


Crash

by ssrhpurgatory



Series: Star Trek AU [1]
Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Star Trek Fusion, Angst with a Happy Ending, Betazoid, F/M, Holodeck Sex, It's not weird if you make a holodeck character of the person you're lusting after... right?, Look this entire account is just where I stick my Hilbert/Rosemary bullshit, Pining, Pon Farr, Telepath sex, Vulcan Biology, Yes this is an excuse to write trapped in a shuttle gotta fuck fic, hot hot vulcan/betazoid lovings, implied past Heiffel, not that the viewpoint character can remember them when they're done, you’re not going to get anything else here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-15
Updated: 2020-04-13
Packaged: 2020-09-01 18:34:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 47,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20262634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssrhpurgatory/pseuds/ssrhpurgatory
Summary: Doctor V'Ginn of the USS Hephaestus finds himself trapped aboard a crashed shuttle with his Captain's annoying aunt, Rwiari... and a biological process particular to Vulcans about to begin.---At some point I'll write the rest of the Star Trek AU, but the very first part I wrote was this bit of Implied Smut involving Hilbert and my Terrible OC, so this is going up in bits and pieces while I try to make progress on the fic it's a side story to.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

**Day One**

“I’m sorry, you think it’s MY fault that you crashed the shuttle?”

“If you had not been distracting me, I would not have missed the alert for the gravitational anomaly that pulled us into this planet’s atmosphere.”

“And I’m telling you, there _was_ no alert.”

“Impossible.”

“Check the sensor logs!”

“I would, but the shuttle computer is currently malfunctioning.”

“I meant when we get it working again, of course.”

“_You_ are not going to be doing any repairs. You will leave them to me.”

“Doctor, I’m not _helpless_. I know my way around a computer console. I’ve even done a shuttle repair or two in my time.”

~_WOULD YOU JUST LEAVE ME BE?~_

Rwiari reeled backwards at the force of the doctor’s telepathic shout and looked him up and down carefully. “Something’s wrong. You don’t like using your telepathy. And you never shout. It’s illogical.”

“I am simply frustrated,” V’Ginn said. His tone of voice was even, but Rwiari watched him cautiously.

“You don’t get frustrated, doctor. As much as I love to tease you about secretly having emotions, you’ve always kept them well under control when in my presence. Something’s wrong. Did you hurt yourself in the crash? Hit your head or something?”

V’Ginn continued working at the computer console, ignoring her, so Rwiari crossed the shuttle and picked up the medical tricorder that was sitting at his side. His hand shot out and grabbed her by the wrist. “I am fine.”

His grip was strong, much stronger than it needed to be; Rwiari’s hand was already going numb. “You are not fine. Because you’re also always in control of your strength, and you are _hurting_ me, doctor.” ~_Let me help,~_ she added telepathically, sending him a wave of calm with her words.

“I simply need to repair the communications system as soon as possible. Having you make a fuss about my health will cause a delay we cannot afford,” V’Ginn said, letting go of Rwiari’s wrist.

Rwiari set the medical tricorder back down and shook her hand until feeling returned to it. “Why can’t we afford a delay, doctor?”

V’Ginn shut his eyes and took a deep breath, obviously exasperated. “If it will get you to leave me in peace to do these repairs, by all means, use the tricorder.”

Rwiari picked the tricorder back up and started running a scan on V’Ginn. Nothing broken, no contusions… Oh. “I see. Tell me, doctor, what _does_ the Vulcan version of the sex talk sound like? One hundred and one tips and tricks for surviving the pon farr?” She kept her voice light and teasing, smoothing away the sudden jolt of terror the result of that tricorder scan had given her and hiding it under… yes, lust would do. It wasn't as if she didn't find the man attractive, and the physical symptoms of fear and attraction were not so different, in the end.

V’Ginn took another deep breath and shook his head. “Not quite.”

“I’m going to help you get the computer system back online and you are not going to argue. We need to get you out of here before you lose the last vestiges of your rationality.”

V’Ginn looked up at her and nodded stiffly. Rwiari sat down at the other computer console and started running diagnostics. “Something in the atmosphere really did a number on our electronics, didn’t it,” she said, examining readouts. “Most of the systems on the shuttle got knocked out. I’m going to see if I can at least get the emergency beacon going. It’s our best shot at being found if we can’t get communications going.”

“That sounds like a prudent precaution,” V’Ginn said stiffly.

They sat in silence, working, until at last Rwiari couldn’t stand the silence any more. “I’m sorry.”

“I do not actually think you are responsible for crashing the shuttle, if that is what you are worried about,” said V’Ginn in a carefully controlled voice. “I was behaving illogically when I blamed you for that.”

Rwiari rubbed her hand across the back of her neck anxiously. “Not for that. It’s that I think your current predicament might, uh, be my fault.” Her mind had been churning away, thinking over the theory she'd come up with, years ago, about why Isa’s parents had been drawn to one another, how Isa’s mother could have entered pon farr when her mate’s recent death should have suppressed that cycle of it.

“It is not possible for you to be responsible for the start of my pon farr.”

“I’ve entered the phase. My hormones are telling me I’ve only got a few more years to have a child, and it’s entirely possible that, ah, with my attraction to you… I might have been sending out telepathic signals without thinking about it. That could have triggered pon farr, that is.” Of course, her cousin hadn't been in the phase… but he had always found Vulcans attractive, had always wanted to tease one into betraying emotions. An impulse Rwiari could understand well, given her usual reaction to the man in the shuttle next to her.

V’Ginn froze for a moment, his hand hovering over the console. “I… suppose that such a thing could be possible,” he said hesitantly. “But as this is not my first pon farr, it seems highly unlikely that any telepathic signals you might have sent out could have been the cause of it starting. It was simply… time.”

“Well. That’s a relief,” Rwiari said, then frowned and tapped a few more buttons, then reached under the console she was working at to nudge one of the control arrays back into the proper position. “Hold on, I think I’ve just about… ah-hah! Emergency beacon activated.”

“That is good to hear. I am not making much progress with the rest of the communications system.”

“Maybe there’s something wrong with the communications array? I could go out and have a look at it.”

“Without shuttle scanners available, I do not think it is prudent to go out onto the surface of an uncharted planet, even if it is class M.” The look V’Ginn gave her indicated that he had sincere doubts about whether she would be able to reach the outside portions of the communications array even if she were to go out and try to fix it. Rwiari turned back to the display in front of her, studiously ignoring that look.

“Fair enough. I’ll start working on the scanners next.”

They lapsed back into silence, working, but Rwiari kept half an eye on V’Ginn. As time passed, he seemed to be getting more and more agitated, and after another hour of silent work, she spoke up again. “If all we can get going is the emergency beacon, the captain probably won’t realize we’re overdue for at least another forty-eight hours, and given our current distance from the rendezvous point it might take another day or three for her to find us. How long will it be until your condition becomes dangerous, doctor?”

“Eight days is the typical length of time between the onset of pon farr and the point at which it will become dangerous to one’s health.”

“I see.” Rwiari stared down at the computer console she was working at, distressed. “Even if the Hephaestus finds us right away, that isn’t enough time to get back to Vulcan.”

“No, it is not.”

“Do you have a mate waiting for you there?”

V’Ginn took another of those deep, exasperated breaths. “Yes.”

“I’m doubly sorry, then.”

“Do not be. We were bonded as children, but when the time came for our first pon farr, I was already stationed aboard a ship halfway across the quadrant.”

Rwiari made a small noise of concern. “What did you do?”

“What else could I do? I meditated.”

“And what of your mate?”

There was a pause, a roil of conflicted feelings from V’Ginn. “I believe she did much the same.”

“You should send for her. When we get back. The Hephaestus might not be meant to be a family ship, but that doesn't mean there’s no space for them. I’m sure the captain wouldn’t mind you bringing her aboard.”

V’ginn went completely silent and still for a few long minutes, and then said, in a voice tight with something Rwiari thought might be anguish, for all the Vulcan’s emotional state remained opaque to her, “I asked my mate to join me when I received this assignment. I knew it would be many years, and that pon farr would most likely occur again while I was gone. She…” V’Ginn paused, his jaw clenched tight for a moment. “I have spent much of my life in Starfleet. She has not. She did not wish to make her home in space.”

“Oh,” Rwiari said, not sure what to say, her heart breaking a little bit for the staid Vulcan doctor.

“I can feel that.”

“Sorry.” She pulled her emotions back into order and tried to concentrate on getting the scanners working again.

**Day Two**

“I do not understand what is wrong with communications!” V’Ginn paced the length of the shuttle, up and down, obviously agitated.

“We’ll keep working on it, doctor, but first you need to rest,” Rwiari said. “And you really ought to eat something as well. You haven’t done either since we landed.”

“Vulcans can go several days without sleep.”

“Can they go several days without food on top of that?” Rwiari tossed a ration packet at V’Ginn’s head and he caught it without looking, an unconscious display of dexterity that made her pulse race a little bit faster. He was projecting his current state everywhere, and for all that she could normally block any telepathic signal that came her way, there was some part of her that _wanted_ to feel what he was feeling.

After all, it was so much safer than giving in to the terror that kept trying to creep up on her.

At least he was eating; he’d ripped the packet open and had started in on the ration bar contained within, obviously ravenous.

“Better,” she said, and he turned to glare at her. “You’re going feral, doctor. I’m not sure how much more of this I can take.”

“If you would stop projecting your… your desire upon me, I might be able to meditate my way out of this,” he snarled.

“Maybe we should just fight to the death,” Rwiari shot back. If she made a joke of the source of her fear, perhaps it would go away entirely. “If you keep pacing like that I’m more than happy to have a go at killing you. Just because _you_ can’t sleep doesn’t mean you need to keep me awake.”

V’Ginn froze, the ration bar halfway to his mouth. “I do not think I could fight you to the death. I do not dislike you that much,” he said.

“Was that a joke, doctor?”

V’Ginn blushed green, and Rwiari watched in fascination.

**Day Three**

“Look, we’re going to have to do something,” Rwiari said, her voice thick with exasperation. “You’ve become increasingly irrational over the past twenty-four hours, and you’re projecting so much that I’m about ready to claw my skin off. If having sex will make this stop, then let’s just have sex.”

V’Ginn snarled and turned away from her. “I do not mean any offense, but I do not wish to form a mating bond with _you,_” he spat out, even as he wanted to turn back to her, to pull her to him, to accept that offer. Of course it was an empty offer, devoid of anything but physical attraction, and any bonding that might result from it would be an empty shell of what such things should be… but he still wanted to accept it. Instead, he kept rubbing his hands, his fingers, back and forth across one another, almost compulsively, as he had been for the better part of the day. The simple action brought him some relief, but not enough.

That body of Rwiari’s had been both temptation and torment to him since she had come aboard the Hephaestus. Of course touching himself was not enough.

“Well, no, of course not. I can’t imagine a middle-aged Betazoid is any Vulcan’s idea of an ideal mate,” Rwiari said, her voice full of a dry sarcasm. “But this is intolerable.” She lapsed into silence for a few minutes. “Tell me about the mating bond,” she said finally. “How is it formed? Physically?”

“Telepathically.”

“Do you have to form a mating bond in order to resolve pon farr?”

V’Ginn turned back towards her, startled. “I… do not know. Meditation was… was not quite enough in the past, but it is not possible to form a mating bond with a hologram…”

“Right. Then we’re going to try having sex. Now,” Rwiari said, and reached behind herself, starting in on the fasteningsof her dress.

“I told you, I do not wish to—”

“—form a mating bond with me, yes, I know,” Rwiari said irritably, standing up from the bunk she had been sitting on to shrug her dress off. “But I can keep anyone out of my mind if I really need to—not for long, you know, but long enough for this—so you won’t be able to form one. Almost as good as a holodeck.”

V’Ginn stared as she let the dress drop to the ground. “Will that work?”

Rwiari stripped her undergarments off as efficiently as she had the dress and tossed them aside, then stood there in front of him, completely naked, holding her hands out to him. “Trust me.”

V’Ginn released the tight grip he had twisted his own hands into and reached out cautiously in return, letting his fingers feather carefully along the sides of Rwiari’s. She shivered at his touch, but when he tried to feel her mind, searching for the lust she had been unconsciously projecting that had amplified his own agitated state, he met nothing but a blank wall. It was unsettling, more unsettling than it had ever been to reach for a holodeck character and find nothing, and he almost pulled away from her. But then she interlaced the fingers of both of her hands with his and pulled her fingers through his, slowly, firmly, and his mind blanked out with pleasure.

“Let’s get you undressed,” he heard her say, and she ran her hands up his arms, to his shoulders, her touch light but intimate. She had him out of his uniform in a matter of moments, and then she took him by the hands again and pulled him to the bunk she had been sitting on.

There was something important he needed to remind her of. He pulled his hands away from hers, and when she reached out for him, he withdrew, needing a clear head for a moment. Well, as clear a head as he could get in his current state, deep in the thrall of his own biology, with a woman he had been lusting after for quite some time at his side ready to give herself to him. “Vulcans are much stronger than Betazoids. I may hurt you.”

“Well,” Rwiari said, a little teasing smile on her face, “It’s a good thing you’re a doctor, then.”

She took his hands again, and this time he did not resist.

**Day Five**

When V’Ginn next came to his senses, he had been tucked under a blanket and was laying there alone on the bunk. Rwiari was sitting on the bunk across from him, dressed once again and smiling an odd little smile at him. The burning urge to find his mate—to kill for his mate—was gone, and when he looked at Rwiari, the sight of her was once again a cause for annoyance.

“Mission accomplished,” she said. There was something strange about her voice that he could not quite pick up on, and her mind, when he loosed his control enough to reach for her, still had a blank wall up around it. “And without you distracting me with your mating urges, I managed to figure out what was wrong with the communications array. The Hephaestus is about an hour away, more or less,”she continued, her expression and tone of voice still giving no definite clues as to her mental state.

“I see.” V’Ginn sat up cautiously, holding the blanket to his chest, and winced. “Were you this sore?”

“That is something I only feel comfortable discussing with my doctor,” Rwiari said primly, shooting an arch look and a teasing little flick of telepathic amusement his way that cheered him more than it should have.

“I am your doctor.”

“Ah, well, in that case…” She trailed off, giving him a steady look, suddenly serious. “I’m fine. You… adjusted for my more fragile physiology.”

“I am glad to hear it.”

“Anyway, here’s your uniform,” Rwiari said, holding it out to him. “I’ll just go into the main cabin while you get dressed.” She stood and went over to a console in the main cabin of the shuttle, her movements stiff and careful despite having just assured him that he had not harmed her. V’Ginn frowned. Well, no doubt she would allow him to conduct a medical examination, if he demanded. Asking would not do, but a demand she would give in to eventually.

V’Ginn dressed slowly, shooting glances at Rwiari’s back as he did. Knowing her, he had expected her to peek at him at least once while he was still in a state of undress, but she was hunched over a computer console instead, ignoring him completely. He came and sat at the other console when he was fully dressed.

“Why _do _you still flirt with me?” he asked, not entirely certain why he wanted to know the answer. “I know that when you were a prisoner, you said that flirting with me made you feel like a person again, but now that you are free, I am certain that there are many crew members who would gladly reciprocate. So why me?”

Rwiari finally looked up from the console, her face and her mind blank, he thought deliberately. She took a deep breath as she looked at him, then sighed. “Because you’re safe.”

“Safe?”

“There’s a physical attraction, but nothing more, so you’re unlikely to take my flirting as anything other than me being ridiculous.” She turned her gaze back to the computer console. “It’s like a pressure valve for the phase. As long as I’m chasing after something unattainable, I can trick my mind into accepting the fact that there isn’t anyone waiting in my bed each night.”

“I see,” V’Ginn looked down at his own console. “Do you wish to have someone in your bed each night?”

“Oh, goodness no,” Rwiari said with a laugh, sending another little flick of amusement his way. “I don't want to spend the next few years in a haze of hormones, and I definitely do not want to get pregnant. Anyway, do you know how exhausting that would be for that poor person? It's a matter of stamina, you know.”

“Shuttle Eupheme, come in,” came the slightly garbled sound of their captain’s voice from the coms. “Shuttle Eupheme, do you read?”

“Loud and mostly clear, captain!” said Rwiari. “I’m glad to hear your voice. We’re getting a little sick of emergency rations down here.”

“We’ll beam you out in a moment,” said the captain. “Is the shuttle salvageable?”

“We were not able to get it airborne again, but perhaps someone from engineering might have better luck,” said V’Ginn automatically, grateful that the captain’s interruption had come when it had.

He had been about to offer up the fact that the average Vulcan male had considerably more stamina than even a Betazoid mid-phase, and that would not do at all.


	2. Chapter 2

It was a relief when the Hephaestus finally managed to get a lock on them, when a swirl of light materialized around Rwiari, blocking out the sight of the shuttle she had been trapped in for the past five days and replacing it with one of the transport pads on the Hephaestus. Rwiari stepped down immediately, stumbling a little on legs that still hadn't quite recovered from the exertion that had been required of them, resisting the urge to wrap her arms around her middle, which was just as sore. After all, Isa was waiting in the transport bay for them, and she didn't want to worry her niece.

“We should go to medical bay,” V’Ginn murmured, close by her side. Closer than Rwiari had expected. “I should do a proper examination.”

“I would rather see Dr. Stukov, if you don't mind,” Rwiari found herself answering in a small, stiff voice.

“Allow me to escort you there.” V’Ginn’s face was locked in its usual expressionless mask, but the low murmur of his voice sounded almost desperate.

“Only if you promise to let someone there take a look at you as well.” Rwiari almost reached for V’Ginn in that moment, concerned by that almost-desperation in his voice, but pulled back before her hand came near him. He would hate for her to make a fuss over him, she was sure of it. Instead, she turned to to Isa with a bright smile on her face, planning to inflict all that hastily aborted fussing on her niece instead. “Hello, darling girl.”

“Auntie Ri.” Isa’s face scrunched up, as if she were trying not to cry. She took the three steps that separated her from Rwiari and bent down, sweeping her into a tight hug. Rwiari let out a startled little huff of breath, and then pulled Isa close and tight, as she had done so often when her niece was just a child and in desperate need of someone willing to hold her. There was a brief sob from Isa, and Rwiari felt the hot splash of tears against her shoulder.

“I'm sorry,” Isa said.

Rwiari let out a little laugh, and held Isa tighter. “You don't have anything to apologize for.”

Isa pulled away and swiped her tears away with the back of her hand. “Yeah, I do. I let myself believe the worst when I knew you better than that. I should have been on your side.”

“I did do those things, you know.” Rwiari smiled, a small, regretful smile. “What they put in me wouldn't have worked if I didn't already have the capacity to do what they wanted me to do.”

“Maybe.” Isa shifted uncomfortably, glancing over Rwiari’s shoulder at V’Ginn, awkward with her display of emotion as she so often was around full Vulcans. “But I'm good enough at questioning orders that don't make sense. I should have questioned what they said about you, too.”

“What brought this on?”

“You have to ask?” Isa laughed, in a way that made Rwiari suspect she was only laughing so as to not start crying again. “I spent the past few days expecting to find you dead.”

Rwiari laughed as well, and pulled Isa back into a hug. “It will take just a little bit more than a shuttle accident to kill me, darling girl.”

Rwiari felt a sudden surge of emotion from V’Ginn, and from Isa’s reaction she felt it too. No doubt he was thinking about how he had almost been that little bit more.

“What do you think, Fisjer? Did it land easy enough for salvage?” Isa lifted her head from Rwiari’s shoulder, turning her attention to her Chief Engineer.

The massive Bajoran glanced up from the console he was standing at and smiled. “Oh, definitely, Captain. Only worry is whether we can get a crew down to her through this atmospheric interference. But if we can, they should be able to patch the Eupheme up well enough to get her into the upper atmo, and we can snag her with the tractor beam from there and bring her aboard for a more thorough repair job.”

Isa nodded. “Very well. We don't have any pressing orders at the moment, so take what time you need. I'll have the bridge lock the Hephaestus into geosynchronous orbit.”

“We should go to medbay,” V’Ginn said in a low voice.

Isa released Rwiari. “Go on, then.”

“Yes, captain,” Rwiari said saucily, smiling at V’Ginn’s emotionless echo. Isa’s attention was already on the console and Officer Fisjer, so Rwiari turned and started making her slow and not-quite-limping way towards the medbay, V’Ginn dogging her footsteps.

“I apologize if my conduct aboard the Eupheme has lead you to question my efficacy as a doctor,” V’Ginn said quietly as soon as they were aboard a turbolift.

“It’s got nothing to do with that,” Rwiari assured him. “You've been under a lot of strain for the past few days, and you didn't sleep nearly long enough for a complete recovery. I simply don't want you overextending yourself. And…” she trailed off, trying to figure out how to put it delicately, and failed to come up with anything better than, “And I thought that after what happened, you… I mean, I know you find me irritating, and I imagine you would prefer to not spend any more time with me than necessary.”

There was a sharp little inhalation of breath from V’Ginn at those words, but a swift glance sideways and a gentle brush against his mind revealed no reaction beyond that.

Not that he owed her anything, not even a reaction.

The doors of the turbolift wooshed open again and Rwiari disembarked as swiftly as she was able to. She knew how extremely obvious her lie to V’Ginn about him making allowances for her more fragile physiology actually was, but, well, there was no easy way to tell a man who didn't particularly seem to like you that he had fucked you raw in a hormone-induced haze… and then had done it again and again, keeping at it for the better part of a day, clearly not conscious of his own actions and driven entirely by the heat of a biological process he couldn't help and had obviously resented the effects of.

Her sexual stamina had increased since she had entered the phase, but even Rwiari had limits. And that wasn't even taking into account the attempts he had made to initiate a mating bond with her, one after another, the pressure of it so intense she had almost screamed with the pain of it, the temptation to simply give in and allow it immense.

But they had made it out intact—or at least he had, and she herself would be fine again once she'd gotten treatment for her strained muscles and had a chance to sit down privately and smooth her mind into tranquility.

“Dr. Stukov.” They had reached the medical bay, and V’Ginn called his colleague to them immediately, then stepped away… and to Rwiari’s relief, found one of the nurses and seemed to be requesting a physical exam. Good. He would be fine.

“What in space did you do to yourself down there?” Dr. Stukov frowned as he ran a tricorder over Rwiari.

There. The other reason that she wanted Dr. Stukov to be the one to examine her. She did _not_ want her medical chart reflecting an accurate picture of what currently ailed her, and she knew that V’Ginn wouldn't stand for anything less than accuracy. But Terrans were so much easier to influence than Vulcans were… and Dr. Stukov had a mind particularly vulnerable to empathic manipulation, poor dear. She silently apologized for the headache he would have later and started to work on him as subtly as she could manage.

Half an hour later, the muscles in her legs and core and certain very tender places were no longer screaming with pain every time she moved, and Dr. Stukov was noting the entire thing down in her medical record as injuries from the crash. Rwiari felt quite proud of herself until she glanced up and saw V’Ginn glaring in disapproval at her from across the medbay, where a nurse appeared to be lecturing him about overworking himself.

_~You might have a habit of working too hard to hide behind, but I don't. Would you prefer he start asking awkward questions about whether or not I consented, doctor?~_ she sent V’Ginn’s direction in a fit of pique. Across the room, V’Ginn’s eyes widened almost imperceptibly, and then a light green blush spread across his cheeks and he looked away.

_~Thank you.~ _V’Ginn’s response was stiff and almost seemed grudging, but Rwiari chose to assume the thanks were offered honestly.

_~You’re welcome.~_ “Am I done, doctor?” she asked out loud, turning her attention back to Dr. Stukov.

He let out a low hum of concern. “There seems to be a slight neurotransmitter imbalance…”

Definitely not something she wanted him investigating further, at least not right away. “Just stress, I’d imagine.” She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “After all, five days trapped aboard a downed shuttle with Dr. V’Ginn…” she shuddered theatrically. “You can’t _imagine_ how cranky that man gets in close quarters.”

Dr. Stukov hid his laugh in a cough, and a quick glance over his shoulder revealed that V’Ginn was glaring at her again.

“Very well,” Dr. Stukov said, glancing over her record once more. “But I would like you to return for a checkup in a day or two, just to make certain that there is no serious issue.”

Something she most definitely would do, should it become necessary. She didn't think it would be, of course. She just needed some time alone in her quarters, without a particular cranky—and annoyingly attractive—Vulcan in close proximity. “I will be sure to,” she said, beaming up at Dr. Stukov.

A flash of strong emotion burst out of V’Ginn, though there was no sign of it on his face. Rwiari deliberately ignored him, pulling her own thoughts and emotions safely behind the walls that kept them secure. After all, it wouldn't do to make it this far, only to have V’Ginn notice what she had been keeping hidden from him since he had finally worn himself out aboard the shuttle.

That would most definitely be a disaster.

V’Ginn felt a surge of irritation as Rwiari flashed a bright smile up at Viktor. Bad enough the woman was using her empathy to manipulate the man; she did not have to use her charm as well.

He wanted to get his hands on that report Viktor had just produced, to see the results of the scans Viktor had done for himself. Just to be certain that he had not caused any lasting harm to Rwiari, of course. Her little quip in the transport bay about a shuttle accident not being enough to kill her had sent a shock through his system; until that moment, he had not considered that he could easily have been the cause of her death, with the pair of them trapped aboard a shuttle together, with him overcome by a biological urge that could have easily turned violent… and against which she could have done little to protect herself. Even if she had used her empathic powers to calm him, prolonged contact with his mind in that state would likely have had a corrosive effect on her neurological stability, a very dangerous thing for a Betazoid.

The nurse finished with the treatment he had been applying to the strained muscles in V’Ginn’s lower back, and V’Ginn waved him away officiously. The nurse sighed.

“Dr. V’Ginn…”

“I wish to consult with Dr. Stukov. I will make certain that he checks your work.”

The young Terran looked annoyed at the implication that he did not know his work well enough for V’Ginn to trust that he had done it properly, but just at that moment, V’Ginn could not bring himself to care. He waved Viktor over.

“What is Miss Ibreten’s condition?”

“Lots of muscle strain from the crash, of course,” Viktor started, handing the tricorder he had been using over to V’Ginn. “And a fractured pelvis, but all of that was easy enough to fix up, and I completely understand why you didn't want to attempt it with a field medical kit. Delicate work there. My one worry is, well… take a look at those hormone levels. And that's a slight neurotransmitter imbalance, isn't it?”

V’Ginn pulled up the scans and frowned for a moment before remembering what Rwiari had said aboard the shuttle. “Typical fluctuations for a Betazoid who has entered the phase,” he said out loud. _Particularly one who is not seeing to her sexual needs the way she ought to be,_ he found himself thinking as he looked over the scans a second time. No doubt his second-in-command would be appalled by such a revelation; Terrans were often squeamish about such things.

“Really?” Viktor took the tricorder back and frowned at it. “Even for a Betazoid mid-phase, this seems… excessive.”

“I will speak with her about a protocol to manage it,” V’Ginn found himself saying. Of course, the last thing he really wanted to do was interrogate Rwiari about how much sex she was or was not having on a regular basis and to prescribe more if what she was having was inadequate, but if he left that conversation to anyone else, he knew it would never happen. Especially considering the grateful look Viktor was giving him now.

“Oh! I just assumed that was something that she could be relied upon to deal with herself, but if you think intervention is necessary…” Viktor dumped the tricorder back into V’Ginn’s hands. “But for now, you should be resting. No work for at least another two duty shifts. Doctor’s orders.”

V’Ginn let his annoyance show in a brief quirk of his eyebrows before smoothing his mind out to logical calm once more. Viktor smiled indulgently at him and made a shooing gesture with his hands, fully aware that he was the one person on the ship aside from the captain who could order V’Ginn to take the day off.

Something Viktor had said at the start of their conversation finally impacted V’Ginn’s brain, and he pulled up the results of Rwiari’s physical scans and looked them over, wincing. No wonder she’d had difficulty walking. Not just a fractured pelvis, but torn muscles, and contusions on her inner thighs where… well. His own hip bones were not as well padded as hers were. He had obviously left his mark on her.

V’Ginn definitely needed to apologize to her. If she had not been clouding Viktor’s mind with her empathic powers, Viktor could easily have assumed the worst from injuries such as these.

“Dr. V’Ginn. How are you?”

“Captain.” V’Ginn set the tricorder aside for now. He would, of course, want to do another scan some time in the next day or so for comparison, just to make sure that all of the treatments Rwiari had received today had been effective… but that was a problem for another day. “I am… in acceptable condition.”

The treatments the nurse had given him had knit torn muscle back together and had dulled the pain, though no doubt he would continue to be stiff for another day or so. But his captain did not need to know the details.

Isa made a face. “You're as bad as Auntie Ri. ‘Oh, I just got a bit shaken up in the crash! Nothing to worry about now!’” Isa’s impression of Rwiari’s cheerful tone was disturbingly like the woman, reminding V’Ginn once again that Isa had grown up partially in the care of the volatile Betazoid.

The smile slipped off Isa’s face, and suddenly she was all too Vulcan, staring V’Ginn down with an intensity that was terrifying, that powerful mind of hers leashed, but at the ready. “What happened?”

V’Ginn considered his options for half-truths that would satisfy his captain’s curiosity without revealing the full extent of what had passed between himself and Rwiari while they had been aboard the Eupheme. Not that he knew the full extent, though the final medical reports on both of them painted a particularly grim picture of how he had used and abused Rwiari’s body during that time he did not remember.

He settled for something close to the truth. “We had both tired of the other’s company by the time we began our return journey. It was inevitable that we would fight.”

Isa frowned. “Got real nasty, huh?”

V’Ginn felt his face heat. “I… did not keep as firm a hold over my emotions as I should have. I find that Miss Ibreten is, ah, extremely good at provoking illogical responses.”

That had been the right thing to say. Isa let out a sharp bark of laughter. “Oh, she _is_ good at that. Some of my best childhood memories are of her laying in to my uncle and his mate.”

V’Ginn felt a sudden ache at those words. Another pon farr, far from home. Another opportunity to truly bond with his mate-to-be, gone. For all that he had tried to assuage Rwiari’s worry over his situation by claiming that he and his mate had long ago ceased to have much in common—for all that that had been the truth, and not some gentle lie to lessen her guilt—some part of him still craved what he did not have. A mate. Bonded and his, in every way.

“Dr. Stukov has prescribed me two shifts off duty before I may return to work again,” V’Ginn said, rather than comment on Isa’s anecdote. “And I find myself in need of some time to meditate.”

“Of course.” Isa jerked her head to one side. “Go. We’ll talk some more when it's time to debrief from your mission.”

Ah, yes, his mission, V’Ginn found himself thinking as he made his way down the hall from the medbay to his quarters. Providing medical aid to a colony of empaths. The reason why it had been Rwiari in that shuttle with him rather than some official member of the crew.

Of course, the captain would not have been so eager to foist Rwiari off on V’Ginn for that mission had the Hephaestus not been heading in for a resupply at a Starfleet-run station. Rwiari had technically been pardoned of the crimes that had landed her in prison, but her status as a free woman was still tenuous, and V’Ginn could not blame Isa for avoiding any potential awkwardness aboard the station by sending Rwiari on that mission with him. And Rwiari truly _had_ been helpful at the colony. She had soothed the patients who had come in to consult with the fancy Starfleet doctor while he was available to see to more serious maladies, and she had kept their unruly emotions from spilling over into V’Ginn’s mind.

He had almost liked her for that short span of time. It was a pity that it had taken only a few short hours into the return shuttle trip for him to find her irritating once more.

Though now he was wondering how much of that had been true irritation with the woman’s excessive displays of emotion, and how much of it had been the first signs of the onset of his pon farr, confronted with a woman he found physically attractive but who he could not in any good conscience make his own.

Ah, where had that thought come from? Utter, illogical nonsense. Not the physical attraction, of course, but the thought that he might wish to act on it? That he might find in that woman a partner, a mate?

Nonsense.

But very tempting nonsense all the same.


	3. Chapter 3

The first thing Rwiari did upon returning to her quarters was sleep for the better part of a day. She knew that she needed to deal with her mental state—and she had taken the time to pull herself into a state of rigid control before succumbing to her exhaustion, because she knew better than to let herself sleep when her emotions were still in turmoil—but the rest of it could wait until she woke again, she had decided. After all, it would be easier to manage what she needed to do if she was well-rested.

She woke to find a message waiting for her, a summons to the medical bay. Well, Dr. Stukov certainly had not been lax in his duties. Her mind had opened as she had slept; not enough that anyone passing by would have been caught in the stray edges of her thoughts, of course, but enough to be worrisome, so she really ought to obey that summons. But first, she drew herself inwards once more, combing through her surface thoughts, being absolutely sure she had not reached out to anyone near by as she slept.

She could find none of the tattered edges that might indicate that one of her thoughts had snagged on a passing mind, and tried to feel relieved about it. But instead, it just filled her with anxiety for the task ahead. She settled herself comfortably on her bed, put up her walls, shut her eyes, and fell into her own mind.

There it was, standing out like a wound. No, not a wound; there was something fascinating about it, something that left her staring, left her wanting to give in to the madness it represented. And it truly would be madness, to accept this thing into herself.

Had it grown? She couldn’t tell. She cemented the barriers around it back into place, frowning as it pressed against them. But like all thoughts, it had a tenuous, fragile look to it. She knew she could shatter it completely, if only she found the right place to hit it…

A loud beep from the computer brought her out of her mind. “Yes?”

“Message from Dr. V’Ginn,” the computer said.

Rwiari sighed. “Play it.”

“Miss Ibreten, the computer says that you have been awake for five hours, and yet you have not come to the medical bay for your check-in. Please do so within the next half an hour or I will come find you and drag you to it.”

Oh dear. “Computer, message for Dr. V’Ginn. Please send it in… oh, twenty-five minutes? ‘Dr. V’Ginn, as a civilian, I was unaware that the medical staff aboard this vessel had any power at all to give me orders I must obey in a timely manner. I will return to the medical bay for a check-in when and if I find the time to.’ End message.”

The computer beeped a confirmation.

Rwiari attempted to return to the work she had been doing in her own mind, but she had no doubt that V’Ginn had not been joking when he had said he would come and drag her to the medical bay, and the last thing she wanted was for him to come upon her while she was in the middle of it. Would he recognize what she had done? She didn’t know. But she didn’t want to give him any opportunity to, and that meant setting this aside for now and going to the medbay, and hoping that whatever examination happened there would not be enough to reveal her current state of mind.

Because if V’Ginn discovered what she had been hiding from him, she didn't know what would happen.

The computer beeped, and V’Ginn looked up from his work. It wasn't the timer he had set to remind him to go extract Rwiari from her quarters, so it must be a message of some sort. “Yes?”

“Message from Rwiari Ibreten.”

V’Ginn sighed. “Play message.”

Rwiari’s voice came from the speakers, tart and obviously irritated… and the sound of it strangely comforting. “Dr. V’Ginn, as a civilian, I was unaware that the medical staff aboard this vessel had any power at all to give me orders I must obey in a timely manner. I will return to the medical bay for a check-in when and if I find the time to.”

“Terrible woman. I hope she does not think that I will not come extract her from her quarters.”

“Command unclear. Please restate?”

“No command, computer.” V’Ginn returned his attention to the console he was working at, or rather, he tried to. A pleasant sort of irritation had worked its way beneath his skin at the sound of Rwiari’s voice, leaving him unable to concentrate on anything else. It was a relief when, a few minutes later, the timer he had set went off; he closed the nanite simulation he had been working on and left his lab, heading through the medical bay for the rest of the ship.

“And why have I been summoned to the medical bay on this glorious day?” Rwiari swept into the medical bay with a bright grin on her face, and then looked around, obviously noting the lack of personnel. Off in the corner, one of the nurses was doing a check of supplies in preparation for the next shift, but it was just him and V’Ginn on duty at the moment. “Ah. Night, then.”

V’Ginn did his best to hide the way her sudden entrance had startled him. “I wish to make certain that no lasting harm has come from the injuries you received while we were aboard the Eupheme.” He cleared his throat and gestured her over to an exam table, lowering his voice. “And after our, ah, encounter during the away mission, it occurred to me that I should start monitoring your condition more closely.”

Rwiari smirked at him as she hopped up on the table, responding in a low murmur of her own, a vocal modulation that turned her voice into a seductive purr. “Is that a proposition, doctor?”

“Nothing of the sort. But as a Betazoid mid-phase, if you will not take a sexual partner on your own, there is a certain suite of holodeck programs that you should start availing yourself of. I would like you to take a look while I do a complete physical and hormonal workup.” He cleared his throat again, and offered her the data pad he had made the list on.

Rwiari took the data pad and frowned down at it, a little spike of irritation breaking through the surface of her mind. “What concerns is my condition causing that have you prescribing me holodeck sex programs?”

“It is perhaps not an imminent concern, but… you are an extremely powerful telepath. And I would not like to think what might happen should you, say, contract Zanthi fever in your current state,” V’Ginn grabbed a medical tricorder and began her physical.

“I have been inoculated for it, you know. The vaccine might not be 100% effective, but chances of me actually contracting the disease are incredibly low, especially if I remain confined to this ship.”

“Nevertheless, it is better to take precautions,” he said absentmindedly, looking over the result of the physical scan. There was still some bruising, but Viktor’s work on her cracked pelvis had held firm. “I do not wish to wake up some morning filled with the overwhelming urge to mate with our communications officer.”

He felt a little spark of amusement from Rwiari. “That's an awfully specific example.”

V’Ginn felt his face heat. “It was completely random, I assure you,” he said stiffly. After all, that relationship had ended long ago, and V’Ginn’s own actions during the Tiamat’s defection to the Maquis had ensured that the man was no longer even a friend, despite the fact that Officer Eiffel had volunteered to be a subject for V’Ginn’s work with Borg nanites.

“I suppose you do spend more time with him and our head of engineering than you do with any of the other members of the crew, what with that little nanite project you’ve got going with both of them.”

V’Ginn frowned. Had he thought that so loudly that she had been able to pick it up? Or had she learned of it elsewhere? “You are not supposed to know about that.”

Rwiari raised an eyebrow. “Do you honestly believe there’s a single secret on this entire ship that I don’t know about, doctor?”

“I live in hope,” he muttered, attaching a sensor to the base of her skull that would assist with the next part of this scan. His fingers almost seemed to tingle as they came into contact with her skin, but if Rwiari reacted in any way to him touching her, she was not acknowledging it.

“Ah, there’s your Vulcan sense of humor asserting itself.” Rwiari looked down at the data pad and started scrolling through the selections. “To be honest, I rather thought your taste ran more to our stalwart engineer than officer Eiffel. I know I’d be happy to climb the man like a tree if his area of interest included females. But I suppose there’s no accounting for taste,” she finished, her tone going prim and judgmental.

V’Ginn made a choking noise and stopped his scan. “I assure you, I have no interest in either man outside of the scientific.”

“You have no interest, or you think they have no interest in you?” Rwiari flicked her eyes up to meet his, and a tendril of curiosity brushed his mind. He made another choking noise and threw up a barrier in his mind. “Sorry,” she said, smiling at him. “I simply wanted to be certain what sort of situation I was dealing with here. If you like, I could feel Officer Eiffel out for you.”

“Absolutely not.”

“It wouldn’t even be that hard to nudge him in the direction of liking you.”

“That would be completely unethical.”

Rwiari shrugged and turned back to the data pad. “Your loss. Oooh, this program sounds exciting.”

V’Ginn went back to scanning Rwiari. He was silent for a few long moments, then broke the silence with, “Is that even possible?”

“Hm?”

“Nudging another person towards feeling something they might not otherwise feel.” He did not truly want to know the answer, he told himself. Or perhaps he did; perhaps it would explain how utterly compelling he was finding Rwiari’s presence, despite expecting himself to be even more irritated by her than he usually was.

“Nothing simpler,” Rwiari said, half-distracted by the list of holodeck programs. “Of course, there are a few species we Betazoids have trouble reading well enough to influence, but your average non-telepath? It’s remarkably simple to shift their patterns of thought. Doesn’t even take that much telepathy. Words are usually good enough.” She shot him another look, and he felt another curious brush against his mind. “You sure you don’t want me to give it a try?”

V’Ginn leaned in close to her face and lowered his eyebrows, trying to give off the impression of sternness. “Completely unethical.”

“It’s like you’ve met me,” came Rwiari’s sarcastic response.

V’Ginn let out an irritated huff and set the scanner down, pulling the readouts up on the computer screen. “Elevated sex hormones, unbalanced neurotransmitter levels, and you appear to be sending out a low-level telepathic—or perhaps empathic—signal at all times. Based on this engrammatic analysis, your unconscious mind is likely to be the source.”

Rwiari sighed. “Well. One of the downsides of being born with the old mental powers already intact, I suppose. I’ve had to figure out what silence feels like when the world has been noisy from the womb.”

V’Ginn frowned. “I do not understand.”

“My telepathy and empathy were active from the moment I had enough of a brain to process them,” she said. “A medical condition, more or less, that tends to lead to mental problems in the Betazoids it affects, at least if it’s not caught early enough. One that runs in my family. By the time I was born, they were much better at diagnosing it than they had been when my mother was young, which has made me the first member of my immediate family to survive long enough to go into the phase in… centuries, I think.” Rwiari sighed. “Unbalanced neurotransmitter levels, you say?”

V’Ginn glanced back at the readout. “Yes.”

“Best put me on something to balance them now.”

“I will prepare a hypospray.”

“Thank you.” Rwiari had gone silent—completely silent, V’Ginn realized, putting up the same blank wall around her mind that he remembered vaguely from their time aboard the shuttle. It was unsettling.

V’Ginn found the correct medication and injected her before removing the sensor he had placed on her neck. “I would like you to come back in three days for further adjustment, just in case this does not do the job.”

Rwiari nodded. “One more thing, before I go. Since it’s you doing this little checkup and not Dr. Stukov.”

“Yes?”

Rwiari glanced nervously across the medbay at the nurse, and her voice was a barely audible whisper when next she spoke. “Are you on birth control?”

Ah. “No. My last few sexual partners have not been ones I have been capable of impregnating.” His last few before Rwiari, that was. Her, though…

“Then could you make sure that mine’s holding steady? You know that the phase often leads to birth control failures in female Betazoids, and—”

V’Ginn cut her off with a raised hand. “Of course.” It was a natural worry, not just because Rwiari had mentioned that she did not wish to get pregnant, but also… well, with the captain as example, V’Ginn could understand why Rwiari did not wish to bring another such hybrid child into the universe, for all that Rwiari obviously adored her niece.

He examined the physical scan he had started with, and then adjusted a few parameters on his tricorder and ran an additional scan, forcing his hand to hold steady as he pressed the tricorder’s probe against her stomach for a moment. “You will not ovulate for several days. There is no danger of pregnancy.”

Rwiari let out a sigh of relief and hopped down from the examination table. “See you in three days, then.”

“And take a look at those programs.”

Rwiari saluted him mockingly with the data pad. “Yes, sir.”

“You are a civilian. There is no need to call me sir,” V’Ginn said, turning back towards his lab so that he could return to the simulation of nanite behavior that he had been working on before Rwiari had arrived for her physical.

“Oh believe me, it has nothing to do with you being an officer. I simply like it when you’re forceful.”

V’Ginn rolled his eyes, unable to contain his exasperation any longer. “Get out of my medical bay.”

He followed her out of the corner of his eye as she made her way to the door of the medical bay and paused in the half-open door to shoot him a flirtatious look. “You know, some of these holodeck programs take multiple participants. Would you like to join me and work out some of your own sexual frustration?”

“Out!”

With a great burst of amusement and an equally compelling peal of laughter, she was gone.


	4. Chapter 4

Rwiari left the medbay in a thoughtful mood. Thoughtful, and profoundly distressed.

She had been thinking about her relationship with V’Ginn, such as it was, in adversarial terms for so long that it was quite startling to suddenly realize that she cared for the man.

No. This had to be the result of this damn… damn infection in her mind. With luck, the injection V’Ginn had given her would help her fight it off, even if he hadn't known the real reason she had asked for such a thing.

She had needed to steel herself when he had pressed that hypospray to her neck. Not just because of that time, not so long ago, when he had been in charge of keeping her mental powers locked away, when the press of a hypospray against her neck had meant the inevitable dulling of her mind. No, she had needed to hold herself steady because the touch of his fingers—as light and clinical as that touch had been as he had steadied the device against her neck—had still sent a pleasurable shiver down her spine.

A great burst of despair hit her suddenly from down a side corridor, and she ground to a halt, slamming walls into place around her mind. A moment later, Officer Eiffel came into view from around the curve of the side corridor, looking, even for him, unusually glum and anxious.

Rwiari pasted a smile onto her face. “Douglas! Good—” she did not know what shift he was currently working. “Morning, I think?”

He nodded at her. “Hey, Ri.” He had picked up the captain’s nickname for her, and he was so sad most of the time that Rwiari didn't really have it in her to correct him.

“You off to the mess hall?”

He nodded.

“Mind if I join you for a cup of coffee?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

Rwiari fell in at his side, passively absorbing Officer Eiffel’s mental state for a few moments before sending an investigative tendril into his mind, looking for the cause of his current state. She winced as she encountered the officer’s usual stream of consciousness—so much self-hatred was always painful to feel—and dug through the noise. Hm. “So, want to talk about it?”

Officer Eiffel gave her a startled look. “Talk about…?”

“Whatever’s got you looking like a storm cloud over the Opal ocean.”

“Is that somewhere on Betazed?”

“Yes.” Rwiari didn't really want to be the one he talked about this with, but she didn't think it was the sort of thing that he would be willing to bring up with either the captain or with the other former Maquis officer he had arrived with… and the rest of the crew was still a little suspicious of him for being, well, former Maquis. And talking was the only way he was going to root out that despair that had him in its grip, which Rwiari definitely wasn’t willing to continue encountering unexpectedly around the ship. “So tell me. What's wrong?”

Officer Eiffel sighed. “It's nothing, really.”

“I’d certainly like to know what sort of nothing has you projecting it so hard I could feel it more than ten meters away.”

He gave her a startled look. “Really? But humans aren't projective empaths, like, at all.”

“Doesn't mean your bad moods don't leak out, darling.” They reached the mess hall and acquired their coffee—and, in Eiffel’s case at least, breakfast—from the replicators. The look he gave her when she waved him over to a little two-person table was almost appallingly grateful. “Now talk. What has you so despondent?”

Officer Eiffel frowned down at the table. “You're not eating anything?”

“My stomach’s a little upset. Now talk.” Rwiari hadn't meant to let her irritation with the man’s reticence slip out, but she could see the thing that was bothering him sitting there, at the front of his mind, and she hadn't been able to help it. She hurriedly combed through her own mind, flattening that irritation out of existence.

Officer Eiffel sighed, not seeming to have noticed the irritation through the weight of his own emotions. “I… finally got a chance to talk to my ex-wife,” he said. Saying those words out loud, as uninformative a sentence as it would have been if Rwiari hadn't already lifted that information from Officer Eiffel’s mind, was enough to lift a giant weight from him, and the subsequent lightening of the despair he was projecting almost made Rwiari sigh with relief.

“You separated… how long ago?”

A small, pained smile twisted the corner of Officer Eiffel’s mouth as he stared down at his food. “Almost a decade. Before…”

Before the Tiamat’s defection six years ago to the Maquis. Before the time Officer Eiffel had spent in prison, the natural result of his part in that defection.

“And now you're trying to rebuild that relationship.”

“Yes. Well, no. I just… it's my daughter, you know?”

Rwiari didn't know, or at least not beyond what she was picking up from a surface scan of Officer Eiffel’s thoughts, but she nodded anyway.

“I know I don't deserve any place in her life, not really, not after…” he trailed off, but a memory had come to the surface of his mind. A shuttle, downed. An emergency beacon that didn't bring help quite soon enough to avoid irreparable damage. Rwiari suppressed a shudder at that memory of panic, so close and familiar to the panic that had filled her not that long ago. Officer Eiffel cleared his throat and continued. “But anyway, she's almost a teenager now, and I was hoping… but I've done too many things wrong since then.” He let out a harsh little laugh. “The sum of a lifetime of bad decisions, that's me.”

“So make good ones.”

He rolled his eyes. “Oh, come on.”

“I'm not saying it's easy. You think I’m anything but bad decisions myself?” Rwiari grinned and let a sharp little spike of humor brush against Officer Eiffel’s mind, and it seemed to jolt him out of his sarcastic disdain. “But you’ve got to figure it out, one way or the other.” She tilted her head to one side, considering him. “And maybe… maybe you're thinking that it means you've got to start doing things you hate doing, just because they're what some objective observer thinks is good, but good isn't always an objective thing, not when it comes to individuals. Because before that, you need to start accepting that you deserve things that make you feel good, greater good be damned.”

Officer Eiffel was staring at her, wide-eyed, his fork poised over his breakfast. Rwiari reached out and patted him on the arm.

“Even if every decision you've made in your life is a bad one so far, that doesn't mean you aren't allowed to indulge in things that make you happy now. Make the choice to be happy, darling. It's so much easier to make good decisions when you are.” And with that, Rwiari picked up her coffee cup and drained the lukewarm contents, then stood up from the table and left Officer Eiffel—and his much-reduced cloud of despairing thoughts and self-destructive habits—behind.

With luck, he would manage to leave those things behind himself.

Just as, with luck, Rwiari would manage to resolve the matter plaguing her mind.

A pity being happy herself was so far beyond her.

“Hey, so, uh…”

“Yes, Officer Eiffel?” V’Ginn turned back towards Officer Eiffel, who had come in for a new injection of nanites, the result of a promising bit of research V’Ginn had just untangled and wished to try out.

“Oh, come on, man. How long have we known one another? You can call me Doug.” Officer Eiffel had a hesitant smile on his face, an expression V’Ginn was a bit taken aback by, even more so than Officer Eiffel’s insistence that V’Ginn call him by his first name.

“Doug, then,” V’Ginn said stiffly. “You needed something else?”

“Yeah. I… yeah.” Doug let out an awkward little laugh and ran his hand over the back of his neck. “Look, I know we were never exactly friends—” A strange acknowledgment of what had been a strange relationship all those years ago, a pair of people who did not particularly care for one another’s society but who found themselves remarkably compatible in the bedroom— “but, well, you're kind of the closest thing I've got to a friend, these days. And I just… do you like 3-D chess?”

V’Ginn stared blankly at Doug for a long moment. “I…”

Doug ducked his head, blushing, and waved a hand dismissively. “Right, never mind. I'll get out of your hair.”

“I like 3-D chess.”

“Right! Good. Well, I'm not very good at it, but it occurs to me that, well, I've been spending all of my free time on a holodeck alone, or, y’know, sometimes with Hera, but you know that holodeck characters, no matter how good the programming is, aren't quite like real people, and I…” Doug trailed off, his blush deepening. “I'm babbling. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm getting, y’know, a little weird with just Hera to talk to, what with most of the folks on this ship giving me the cold shoulder about the whole Maquis thing, and if you'd like to come play 3-D chess some evening, that would be… nice.”

V’Ginn found himself staring at Doug, trying to figure out what he thought of this proposal. Doug waited awkwardly, shifting from foot to foot, his gaze flitting from floor to the ceiling over V’Ginn’s shoulder and back again.

“What are your expectations for this… relationship?” V’Ginn finally asked, breaking the silence.

Doug’s eyes went wide, and he looked V’Ginn straight in the eye for the first time since they had started this conversation. “I don't want to, uh, revisit the past,” Doug said hesitantly. “I don't think I'm in the sort of place where I could… could have sex with someone without getting emotionally attached, and that’s… well, that’s not really your thing.” The blush had returned when Doug had mentioned sex, though he didn't stammer over the words like V’Ginn had observed other Terrans doing. “I just want a friend,” he said, his shoulders hunching up around his ears. “I'm lonely, and I want a friend.”

A truly unexpected request… but one V’Ginn could not quite bring himself to refuse. “Perhaps tomorrow night. I will be free at 2200.”

Doug’s face lit up with a smile. “Thanks. I'd say you won't regret it, but, well, you know how I get so you probably will. But thanks.”

V’Ginn nodded, and then found himself frowning. “You have mostly avoided me since you joined the crew of the Hephaestus. Why have you suddenly decided that I am the solution to your loneliness?”

Doug shrugged. “Just, I was having a really bad day yesterday, and then someone kicked some sense into me. Said that I deserved to be happy, no matter what shitty decisions I’d made in the past. And I figure part of being happier is not secluding myself so much, yeah?”

V’Ginn felt the frown dig itself deeper on his face. “Who was it who, ah, ‘kicked some sense’ into you?” he asked, suspecting he already knew the answer.

“Oh, you know. The captain’s aunt. She—why are you making that face? Did I say something wrong?”

V’Ginn smoothed his sudden fury away, shaking his head. “No. I need to get back to work. Will see you tomorrow night at 2200 for chess.”

Doug gave him a cautious, somewhat terrified look, and then nodded. “Yeah, sure. See you then.”

V’Ginn waved him off and waited until Doug had left the lab, and then a few moments longer. And then, in a clipped, irritated tone, he asked the computer for the current location of Rwiari Ibreten.

“Rwiari Ibreten is in her quarters,” the computer intoned in its pleasant female voice.

“Thank you.” V’Ginn made certain that the recording device he had implanted in Doug to keep an eye on the effects of the nanites was working properly, checked that the lab console was set to alert him wherever he might go on the ship if something started to go wrong, and stalked out of his lab, heading in the direction of the Hephaestus’s few civilian quarters. He ignored the startled looks the medical staff on duty gave him as he made his way towards the door of the medbay.

She was not going to get away with this nonsense.

He found himself reaching towards Rwiari with his mind as he traversed the corridors of the Hephaestus, almost anticipating her presence. He had not seen any sign of her aboard the ship since she had come for her check-in the day before, but he had found himself looking for her everywhere. He was almost grateful that Doug had given him an excuse to hunt her down.

Ah, where had those thoughts come from? What illogical nonsense. V’Ginn was looking for her now because she had obviously given in to the urge to prod Doug in his direction, and he was furious about it. He most certainly wasn't looking forward to interacting with the annoying Betazoid.

Perhaps she had felt him reaching for her, or perhaps he had been projecting his fury further than he had realized, because when he reached her door, it opened before he could press the button to signal his presence. He stood there staring stupidly at the open door for a long moment, barely registering the room beyond. The door opening had thrown him off balance and had dissipated a good deal of the anger he had been trying and failing to smooth away since Doug had told V’Ginn who had offered him the advice which had lead him to asking if V’Ginn wanted to play chess.

Rwiari’s irritable “Well, are you coming in or not?” goaded him into action. He stepped in to the small main room of the civilian quarters Rwiari had been living in for the past few months, ever since Captain Isa had ignored orders and decided to release her aunt from the brig before Rwiari’s criminal record had officially been cleared. It was crowded, even with the only furniture being a bed and a small table meant to seat two people, but compared to the cell she had occupied before that, the accommodations were spacious and comfortable.

Rwiari emerged from what V’Ginn suspected was a closet, tying a robe around her middle. “What's wrong? Did something happen to Isa?”

V’Ginn found he was staring and could not stop, his anger completely forgotten in a sudden rush of lust. The robe had done an adequate job of one thing, and one thing only; it made sure that Rwiari was not completely naked.

He thought he might prefer her naked, to be honest. In the Betazoid way, Rwiari was so unselfconscious about her body that her being naked, even in a room full of people, hardly registered as nudity… but this robe! It was thin and silky and clung to the curves and folds of her body, highlighting just how lush that vast expanse of hip was, how tempting the wide curve of her stomach. And further up…

As if sensing the direction of his thoughts, one of Rwiari’s hands crossed over her chest, tugging the neckline of the robe more securely into place.

“Dr. V’Ginn? What do you need?”

You, he wanted to say. And then, suddenly, he remembered his fury, remembered that this woman was volatile and unscrupulous and not to be trusted in the slightest.

“I need you to never again do what you did yesterday.”

Rwiari blinked, and he felt a little jolt of surprise from her. “…come to the medbay for a check in? All right, though that raises the question of what I ought to do if I need medical care.”

V’Ginn growled. “You are being deliberately obtuse.”

She raised her eyebrows and was apparently doing her best to look completely innocent, which even V’Ginn had to admit she was quite good at. “Then you're going to have to be more specific. What—” She winced, grinding to a halt. She had sent a curious tendril of thought his way, obviously hoping to read something of what had brought him here from his mind, and V’Ginn had slammed walls up around his mind in response.

“You know exactly what you did,” V’Ginn snarled at her. “How dare you manipulate Officer Eiffel like that? Dr. Stukov, I could understand, can even forgive, but there was no reason to do that to Officer Eiffel.”

Rwiari was staring blankly at him. “I… what exactly am I supposed to have done to Officer Eiffel?” she asked, sounding baffled.

“Do not pretend innocence. You… you ‘nudged’ him towards me, did you not? There is no other explanation for what I just experienced.”

Rwiari’s eyebrows, which he had assumed were as high as they went, climbed her forehead by another fraction of a centimeter. But her voice, when she spoke, was calm and centered in a way that belied the surprise on her face. “And what, pray tell, did you just experience?”

“Officer Eiffel,” he responded in a stiff voice that was just shy of shouting, “asked me if I would like to play 3-D chess with him.”

Her eyebrows, which had been slowly descending, shot back up at the mention of 3-D chess. “I see. And wanting to play chess is unusual behavior for Officer Eiffel?”

V’Ginn cast his mind back to his time serving aboard the Tiamat, to the lounge that had been frequented by off-duty officers. He had not spent much time there himself, but in his memories, more often than not, there was the figure of Doug, hunched over a chessboard with one member of the crew or another. “Well, no, but…”

“I see. In that case, was there some sign that his mind had been tampered with? I'm sure you know how to detect empathic manipulation. It should stand out like a beacon to a doctor—and a telepath—of your caliber.”

And it would have, too, if V’Ginn had thought to check for it rather than succumbing immediately to the urge to hunt down Rwiari and make her pay for her actions. “That is not relevant—”

“I think it is very relevant if you're going to go around accusing me of things I haven’t done,” Rwiari snapped. And then her face softened, and her voice did too. “He was lonely, V’Ginn. He was lonely and sad and hating himself. All I did was tell him it didn't have to be that way. No mention of you at all.” A wry little twist of a smile tweaked the corners of her mouth up, returned a bit of sharpness to her voice. “And really, I don't think you can blame me if I told him he deserved to make choices that made him happy and he decided that meant making better friends with you, now can you?”

The last of V’Ginn’s rage snuffed itself out like a light. No, he could not blame Rwiari for that. And it was just the sort of illogical decision that would appeal to a Terran like Doug. “I suppose I cannot,” he admitted stiffly.

“Well, then. Are we done here? Because I'm afraid you woke me up from a nap when you came raging down the corridor like that, and I'd quite like to get back to it if you don't mind.”

She had dozed fitfully aboard the Eupheme, curled up on a bunk but alert to every move he made in the confines of the shuttle. She had only ever slept the same way when she had been a resident of the brig.

He wondered what she would look like when she slept properly, all those curves soft and relaxed, that spiky mind at rest.

He would not get a chance to see it.

“Yes. I am done.” He bowed his head stiffly to her. “My apologies for the interruption, Miss Ibreten.”

“We’ve had sex, doctor, so if anyone on the ship has the right to call me Rwiari, you do.”

Ah. Suddenly he could understand the average Terran’s awkwardness around the subject of sexual intercourse. He felt his face flush. “And when I remember such a thing happening, I will do so. But I…” Why was his face so warm?

“Oh, poor dear. It's all a blank to you, isn't it?” Rwiari’s tone was sympathetic, but he could feel a surge of amusement—and was that relief?—from her mind.

He realized, suddenly, that he had intended to apologize the day before, but the woman’s usual flippant manner had thrown him so far off balance that he had not remembered to. “I know… I know that I hurt you.” He wanted to reach for her and show her that he could be gentle, but he didn't quite dare in the face of the expression she now had on her face. “I could have killed you. Perhaps you thought that what happened would be safer than waiting out my pon farr, than hoping that the Hephaestus would find us—”

“They wouldn't have found us,” Rwiari interjected. “Not without communications up and running. Not in time. And that wasn't getting fixed without fixing what was wrong with you first. Someone less telepathically sensitive might have managed it, but me?” Rwiari shrugged.

“Then you should have let me burn myself out, rather than endanger yourself.”

Rwiari laughed a little at that, a harsh, bitter little bark that had no humor in it at all. “I would have attempted to murder you, if I'd had to deal with one more day of that. I think we found the best of all possible outcomes, hm? Accept it and move on, doctor.”

“And may I not even apologize for harming you?”

Suddenly he could not read Rwiari’s face or mind, and he realized that she had slid the walls in around her thoughts so subtly that he had not noticed. And these were not the usual walls of a telepath protecting themselves, but instead the same utter blankness that he remembered vaguely from when he had reached for her aboard the Eupheme.

“You may,” she said in a still, dull voice. “And I will even thank you for it, if it will get you out of my quarters.”

“I see. Well, then.” V’Ginn bowed his head in her direction once more. “I will bid you good day and take my leave.”

A false little smile found its way to Rwiari’s face. “Have a lovely evening, doctor.”

He nodded acknowledgment and left her quarters, pushing down a strong surge of emotion as he went. Regret, longing, anger—and not at her, but turned inward, at his own folly.

They had almost liked one another, during that short time they had been working together on his recent mission. And then the Eupheme had crashed, and what had happened between them had happened… and now it was clear that, instead of that almost-liking turning into a friendship between the pair of them, as it so easily could have, for Rwiari it had turned into a hatred of him.

He did not dare consider how it had changed his feelings for her.


	5. Chapter 5

Rwiari had taken to secluding herself in her quarters since she had returned to the Hephaestus. It felt safer, given the current state of her mental abilities, given the pressure of that foreign thing in her mind.

But she had known that it wouldn’t be possible to avoid her niece forever.

“Isa. Darling girl. What are you doing here?”

“I wanted to check up on you. Computer says you haven’t left your quarters in a couple of days.”

“I’m fine.”

Isa frowned, which meant that Rwiari hadn’t done nearly as good a job of pretending she actually was fine as she had meant to.

“I’m just off duty. Mind if I come in for a cup of tea?” The look on Isa’s face left Rwiari certain that her niece would not take no for an answer.

“Come on in, then.” Rwiari stepped back from the door and headed towards her replicator. “Any preferences?”

“I’m feeling nostalgic for the year I spent on the Enterprise as an ensign. Earl Gray?”

“Just a moment.” Rwiari ordered up a pot and two cups, and carried it over to her little table, where Isa was already lounging in one of the chairs. “Anything exciting happening?”

Isa poured the tea, raising an eyebrow at Rwiari’s question. “You’d usually know before me if something exciting was happening on board this ship.” She picked her own cup up, holding it in both hands, as if warming them. “But no. It’s business as usual out there. Except for the fact that my aunt has been hiding in her room and won’t tell me why.”

Rwiari forced a little laugh out and cast about for an excuse. “Maybe I just got sick of these people treating me like a counselor. You know I have no patience for that sort of thing, darling girl. Not when so many of the solutions are ‘talk to the person you have a problem with’ or ‘shut up, stop being an ass to your coworkers, and do your job.’”

Isa had a wry smile on her face. “Yeah, but before you got pardoned, most of those conversations came to me, so let me say, I _really_ appreciate your services.”

“I can’t order them to not be assholes to one another! You can.”

Isa let out a bark of laughter. “Like they listen to their captain.” She paused, and studied Rwiari quietly. “But that’s not actually what’s got you locking yourself up in your room, is it?”

Rwiari tested the boundaries of her mind, making certain that Isa would not be able to pick up on anything but the most surface of surface thoughts. Though truth was, she didn’t really know how powerful a telepath Isa was. Not when half of her heritage was from one of the most volatile bloodlines to ever emerge on Betazed, not when the other half had come from a Vulcan clan known for producing terrifyingly strong telepaths every few generations. Not when Isa had been able to drive off a Q with just the power of her mind alone.

“I’m… avoiding Dr. V’Ginn.” A little bit of the truth would hopefully be enough to put her niece off the scent.

“Ah-hah! I thought it might be something like that. He said you two had a pretty bad fight while you were trapped on the Eupheme, but then he turned bright green every time I mentioned you in his briefing on that little mission the two of you went on together.” Isa smirked across the table at Rwiari. “So, tell me, did you two fight before or after you had sex with him?”

Rwiari felt her face heat at Isa’s question, and picked up her tea cup, hiding her distress in a sip. Was it really so obvious? “Nothing of the sort, darling girl. Flirting with the man doesn’t necessarily mean I want to have sex with him.”

Isa’s look was dubious, to say the least. “Well, you can’t tell me it was just because you enjoyed discombobulating the man who was in charge of pumping you full of drugs while you were a prisoner in the hope that he would make a mistake and leave you with your mental powers uninhibited. Because you didn’t stop flirting with him when that stopped.”

Rwiari took another sip of the tea. “You know, I’d rather talk about something else.”

Isa sighed. “You’re no fun.”

“And you’re just looking for something to tease Dr. V’Ginn about, but I’m sorry, I don’t have anything to give you.”

“The man needs to be teased. He gets too serious without it. And then he gets grumpy.”

“So find your own reasons to tease him.”

“Fine…”

“Anyway, I rather suspect my time spent flirting with Dr. V’Ginn will shortly come to an end.”

Isa raised an eyebrow. “What, have you been thinking about making a move on someone who might reciprocate your flirting?”

“No, I have no interest in a relationship of my own.” Rwiari took a sip of her tea. “I was thinking about turning the energy I was spending on flirting to something a little more fun to observe. Matchmaking.”

“Matchmaking.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Anyone I know?”

Rwiari smirked across the table at her niece. Turnabout was fair play. “Well, there’s you and that gorgeous first officer of yours…”

Isa’s eyes opened wide, and she spit the sip of tea she had just taken back into her cup. “Oh, no. I mean, don’t get me wrong, Ranuyr—I mean, Lieutenant Minkowski—_is _gorgeous, and I do like her, but with regulations against relationships within the command structure being what they are…”

Rwiari laughed. “And you know I’m teasing you, darling. No, I was thinking about finding Officer Eiffel someone. He’s awfully lonely.”

Isa frowned. “I think Doug may still be trying to get back together with his wife.”

“She's halfway across the quadrant, and I highly doubt she'll ever forgive him for that shuttle incident with their daughter, even if the child has made a full recovery. Or at least Officer Eiffel doesn't think she will, and it's the sort of thought that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Isa’s frown grew deeper, and she shot Rwiari a little telepathic stab of disapproval. “You really need to stop picking through people's thoughts.”

“Well, then, they really ought to stop projecting them all over the place. Is maintaining a bare minimum of mental discipline too much to ask of non-telepaths?” Rwiari shot back irritably. “In any case, I didn't have to probe for this information,” she continued after taking a deep breath to calm herself. “I happened to run into Officer Eiffel after he'd had a conversation with his wife, and he wanted someone to talk to.”

Isa raised a skeptical eyebrow. “And you didn't telepathically nudge him into deciding you'd make an excellent confidant?”

Rwiari took another sip of her tea and shot Isa an arch look over the rim of the cup. “Well, I didn't say _that.”_

“You're a menace,” said Isa drily. “I don't know why I let you stay on this ship.”

“Because you’re terrified that some shadowy Starfleet organization is going to kidnap me and put me back to work as a spy and assassin if you let me leave.” Rwiari set her tea cup down and folded her hands in her lap. “If we could get back to the subject at hand?”

Isa picked her own tea cup up. “Who did you want to try setting Doug up with, anyway?”

“Dr. V’Ginn,” Rwiari said.

Isa choked on the sip of tea she'd just taken and started coughing. Rwiari waited patiently for Isa to start breathing again.

“I'm sorry, did you say Dr. V’Ginn? Stuffy, pain-in-the-ass, traditional-Vulcan-ways-are-the-best V’Ginn? And you want to set him up with ‘I did my thesis on the Tamarians because I just feel like they would get me, man” Doug?”

“That is what I said, yes.” Rwiari picked her tea cup back up and took another sip, studiously ignoring the perplexed look Isa was giving her. “Is there anything in the regulations that would prevent it?” she asked after Isa continued to stare at her silently.

“Well, no, but…” Isa trailed off. “Dr. V’Ginn and Doug? I just don’t see how that’s happening. And what about whatever it is that’s going on between you and V’Ginn, huh? You just going to throw him at someone else and pretend you don’t mind if it actually winds up working?”

“Why would I mind?”

“You like him. V’Ginn, that is. I don’t know why, because he really is a stuffy pain in the ass, but you do. And since you got back, it seems like things have gone all weird between you two, and here you are claiming that you didn’t have sex, but if it wasn’t that, what was it, Auntie Ri? Because this isn’t normal for you. And that’s got me worried.”

“I really don’t know what you mean,” said Rwiari, carefully projecting a sense of nonchalance.

Of course, Isa knew her too well to be fooled by that. “Uh-uh. Not good enough, Auntie Ri. I send the two of you off on a five-day mission to deliver medical supplies to a colony of empaths and the two of you crash your shuttle on the way back, fine. That sort of thing happens from time to time. One of the hazards of space travel. But the way you two are always at each other's throats, I expected to get there and, I don't know, find one of you off in the woods camping out because you couldn't stand living in the shuttle with one another a day longer.” Isa paused, looking down at her tea. “Or I expected him to finally realize you're just teasing him when you wind him up and if he tried responding in kind, the two of you might actually become friends.”

“Goodness, being friends with that man? Why ever would I want to do that?” Rwiari said, keeping her voice and her surface thoughts light and teasing, covering over the fact that, truth be told, she'd like to be much more than friends with the staid Vulcan doctor. She'd suspected for some time that if he stopped being so repressed for just a moment or two, he might be quite fun to know, and while she knew that pon farr wasn't exactly a normal circumstance, his actions while under its influence had only confirmed that impression.

But he wasn't interested in her, and the frustration of feeling him so tightly wound in on himself that he felt like a bomb about to go off was overwhelming every time she encountered him. So the sooner she found him someone he could let that side of himself go with, the better.

“Auntie Ri…”

Rwiari set her cup back down on the table with a decisive click. “Look, darling, I know you wanted a nice little chat, but I am actually due in medbay for a second check-up, so I’m afraid I’m going to have to kick you out.”

Isa set the half-full cup of tea she’d been nursing back on the table. “Fine. But I’m going to start digging you out of here for meals in the mess hall if you don’t start venturing out of here on your own.”

“If you must, darling girl. Now shoo.” Rwiari herded her niece out of her quarters and slumped back against the door with a sigh once Isa was gone. Well. Time to get dressed properly, if she was going out into the rest of the ship. No more lounging around her room naked except for when company called for a robe.

Better wear something _spectacular._

Rwiari was very good at being startling. So much so that by now, V’Ginn managed to take most of her more-startling outfits in stride.

But today she was wearing a dress that looked like it would be better suited for a ballroom of some sort, or at the very least a fancy diplomatic function, with hair and jewelry to match. It was completely out of place for a quick trip to the medbay for a checkup.

Rwiari paused in the door, apparently drinking in the attention her appearance had gotten from everyone who was currently on duty, a little smile on her face. She caught V’Ginn’s eye and that smile turned into a rather naughty grin, the expression of someone who had been caught doing something not-quite-right but who didn’t care that she had been caught at it.

“Miss Ibreten. So good of you to make it to your check-up.” V’Ginn summoned her over with a brief jerk of his hand, and she floated her way across the med bay to his side.

“Dr. V’Ginn.”

“Come. We will do this exam in my lab, or no one else will manage to get anything done while you are in the medbay.”

Rwiari let out a light, tinkling laugh that rang false in V’Ginn’s ears, but she followed him into his lab.

“What is… all of this?” He gestured at her gown as she hopped up on to the exam table that V’Ginn normally only used when Doug or Officer Fisher were in his lab for a new injection of nanites.

Rwiari glanced down and bit her lower lip a little nervously. “Can you blame me if I wanted a little bit of armor in place before I saw you again?”

He could not. And he appreciated it himself; the image of her in that soft, silky robe that she had been wearing when last he had seen her was seared into his mind. But this gown was hard and structured, the underpinnings pushing and pressing her into a certain shape which, while attractive, had none of the unselfconscious appeal of her body soft and loose beneath that robe.

He did not answer her, though, because to answer her would be to acknowledge that she hated him now, enough to want armor between them. So instead, he began his physical, first with a list of questions about what she had been doing with herself the past few days and whether she had experienced any noticeable side effects, either of the neurotransmitter imbalance or the injection he had given her. It worried him that she had not left her quarters since she had last come to see him; she would normally be out among the crew, holding court on the recreation deck, chatting with crew members over meals. And then he began his scan, and he worried even more.

She had lost nearly three kilos in the three days since she had come in for her last check-in. Not so much that it was out of the realm of usual bodily fluctuations, but still, it worried him, especially when she had only recently achieved the body weight her metabolism functioned most efficiently at after years of undernourishment in prison.

“You are eating properly?”

Rwiari raised an eyebrow. “What does that even mean?”

“Computer, has Rwiari Ibreten been meeting her basic nutritional requirements the past three days?”

“Hey!”

“Rwiari Ibreten has consumed five replicator-issued meals in the past three days. Of those five meals, the majority have been returned to the replicator with more than half of the meal remaining,” the computer intoned.

“That’s personal.”

“So why have you not been eating?”

Rwiari’s jaw firmed stubbornly. “The smell of food has been making me nauseous.”

V’Ginn scowled at her. “And you did not think to list this among the symptoms you have experienced?”

“I didn't think it was important.” A brief, guilty surge swirled to the top of her mind, putting the lie to her words. She did realize it was important, but she hadn't wanted him to know—why? But there those walls were, up around her mind, blanking out even the surface thoughts that were usually so easy to skim.

“The neurotransmitter imbalance has worsened. Whatever is causing that could be causing your nausea as well. But if I do not know about the nausea, I cannot include it in my assessment of your condition.”

Rwiari gave him a forced little smile. “I’m sorry.”

“You are not.” V’Ginn sighed. “I will attempt another injection. A different drug, this time. And something for the nausea.”

“Thank you.”

“Getting your hormonal state under control would probably help. I want you to actually go try out some of those holodeck programs this time, hm?”

“I’m not sure I’m ready for that.”

V’Ginn raised an eyebrow, and Rwiari blushed.

“It’s just that I’m still a little… sore. In a few places,” she stammered out.

“It has been four days.” What had he done to her, that still had her sore four days later?

“And there was some bruising in a place I didn’t dare mention to Dr. Stukov.” She smiled awkwardly at him. “It _is_ almost back to normal. But just give me another day or two before expecting me to get back in the saddle, hm?”

“Very well. But I expect to see a holodeck reservation with your name on it by the end of the week.”

“I promise.” She smiled properly at him this time, and those walls around her mind lowered enough to reassure him that she meant it.

“Very good. Now go along to your ball, or whatever it is you are dressed like that for,” V’Ginn said, feeling his own cheeks heat a little at the sight of a genuine smile from Rwiari. He hadn’t hoped to see such a thing again.

“I only wore this to dance with you,” Rwiari said enigmatically, before sliding off the exam table and bustling her way out of his lab, not giving him a chance to respond.

What had _that_ been about?


	6. Chapter 6

Rwiari forced herself out into the ship over the next couple of days, never longer than half an hour at a time, but long enough to see people and be seen and, hopefully, to assuage whatever concerns her niece and the ship’s uptight CMO had about her secluding herself.

It was painful, every outside emotion grating at her nerves, every noise too much. But she needed to keep up some semblance of normalcy if she wanted to get through this without causing other people to worry unnecessarily. Because worry really was unnecessary. There wasn’t any mental tangle she couldn’t undo, given time. And as long as she kept others from worrying, she had all the time in the universe.

V’Ginn had been right about one thing, though. She really ought to start taking better care of her sexual health. It was bad enough that her mind was as unbalanced as it was; the constant surge of hormones caused by the phase was only making things worse. Perhaps once that was dealt with, she would be able to spend less time fantasizing about someone railing her senseless and more time working on the issue that had been plaguing her.

Of course, the list of holodeck programs V’Ginn had given her was nonsense. Far too many of them took place on Risa, and it had been years since Rwiari had been able to think of the place without a surge of distaste. But perhaps if she exported some of the characters into other scenarios…

Half an hour of work at a console later, and she had a program that she thought would suit her needs. “Computer, are any of the holodecks open?”

“Holodeck Beta is free until 2300,” the computer responded. “Do you wish to make a reservation?”

“Yes, please. For the next couple of hours, at least,” Rwiari said with a smile. “And send notice of it to Dr. V’Ginn, if you would. It will stop him from pestering me about it.“

V’Ginn set the latest nanite simulation aside and sighed. He’d been at it for half the afternoon, trying one modification and then another, but something about the projections was still… incomplete. Not quite right.

It wasn’t as if Borg nanites couldn’t be used to heal, with the correct modifications. There was even a case or two of them being used to bring someone back from the dead. But without the connection to the Collective, their uses were limited. Using them for healing required frequent injections because the nanites went inert after a short while, but there had to be a way to get them to feed off the electromagnetic currents of the body, to stay active without need of a Borg charging station or the link to the Collective. A way to give the rest of the universe a chance at the same strength and rapid healing the Borg took for granted.

It was clear that he was not going to find the solution tonight. The logical thing to do was to go get some food and some rest and to try again in the morning.

But as he started saving files and setting up simulations to run until he was next in his lab, a niggling thought that had been lurking at the back of his mind all week finally stopped lurking. Rwiari had said that she had been born with her mental powers active; could that not explain the reason for the first drug he had tried on her not working?

“Computer, please display the information you have on file about Betazoids who are born with their mental powers intact.”

“One moment.”

The display blinked, and information started appearing. Standard brain scans, physical scans, past cases. V’Ginn frowned and started reading.

Several hours later, he’d gone from mild curiosity to a state of concern, almost distress.

“Computer, where is Rwiari?”

“Holodeck Beta.”

V’ginn gathered several items from storage and started for Holodeck Beta, first at a fast walk, then finally giving in and breaking in to a run until he found himself outside the door to Holodeck Beta.

“Computer is Rwiari still in Holodeck Beta?”

“Yes.”

“Computer, open the door to Holodeck Beta.”

“I cannot. The user has engaged privacy settings.”

“Medical override, code AH-34.” The door to the holodeck swished open, and V’Ginn stepped through onto a sunny beach. “Risa?” He glanced up at the sky. Pink clouds. No, it must be Betazed. Rwiari’s homeworld hadn’t been among the programs that he had suggested for her recreation, but perhaps she had been homesick.

The beach was rocky rather than sandy, the air thick with the smell of salt. There was no sign of Rwiari, but there was a rocky outcropping not too far away that she could easily have been concealed behind, and he headed that direction. The beach beyond the outcropping was strewn with Rwiari’s clothing and the woman herself was floating in a shallow saltwater pool, completely naked. He averted his eyes at once, suddenly, astonishingly overcome by how much he wanted to join her there and hating himself for that awareness. “There you are. We need to talk.”

“Doctor?” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her sit up in the pool. “What are you doing here?”

“I am here because I have discovered that I still did not have the proper information to treat you when you were last in the medbay,” he said, his eye drawn against his will to Rwiari’s body. “Do you have a towel around here somewhere?”

“No. Computer, end program.”

V’Ginn turned his back to Rwiari and stood there awkwardly, listening to her shuffle back into her clothing.

“I’m decent,” she said after a moment. “Though I really don’t understand how you can be this squeamish about it. You’re a doctor. And it’s not like you haven’t seen me naked before.”

“I do not mind naked bodies,” he said in an even tone as he turned around. She hadn’t bothered doing all the fastenings on her dress up, but she was covered.

“So it’s just mine in particular that’s causing squeamishness? I’m so flattered,” she shot back, her voice drily sarcastic.

“Not… not squeamishness.” V’Ginn got out. His face was heating, and he internally cursed the way his normally firm control over his emotions always seemed to slip around Rwiari, even more so after the incident aboard the Eupheme. Of course, she delighted in finding ways to frustrate him, but his training should have made it easier to suppress how he was feeling. “I do not remember much of what happened aboard the shuttle. The act itself—”

“The sex, you mean,” Rwiari interjected, her tone still dry.

“Yes. The sex. I do not remember that. But I remember you taking your clothing off, and I…” V’Ginn trailed off, looking at Rwiari helplessly.

“You’re associating arousal with my naked body?” Rwiari raised an eyebrow, looking him over skeptically.

“Something like that.”

“I see.” Rwiari went silent and blank for a few long moments, drawing her emotions into her mind and smoothing them into tranquility before she spoke again. “So why do we need to talk?”

“I did some reading on Betazoids. You should have informed me of the extra medical needs of Betazoids born with their mental powers active. You require an entirely different course of care than I would use on a less-powerful telepath, and I have no doubt that the injection I gave you a few days ago has not done nearly enough to correct the imbalance you are suffering from.”

“I thought you knew how powerful a telepath I was,” Rwiari said, staring at him with a curious little look on her face and that blank wall covering her mind. “And I did tell you about my condition, you know.”

“But I did not know that for Betazoids born with their mental powers intact, there is no line between the mental and the physical, in the same way as for Vulcans. If your neurotransmitter levels are off, if your telepathic powers run out of control, it may have physical consequences. Or mental consequences that you never recover from. Or your empathic powers could run out of control and infect your shipmates. And you should have made me aware of that danger yourself. I should not have had to learn it from the ship’s computer.”

Rwiari looked away. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

“It is irresponsible of you to do such a thing!”

“If it had become necessary to treat me for something more severe—”

“No!” V’Ginn interjected. “I have read enough case studies now to know that it does not matter if the problem is severe or not, because mental problems can and will cascade if you are not treated properly, if you are not monitored carefully.” He held up the items he was holding. “I will be injecting you with a monitor that will track your neurotransmitter and hormone levels at all times and which will inform me if they get too far out of balance. And you will come to the medical bay daily for a check in, and you will keep doing what you must to keep your hormonal fluctuations under control.”

“Yes, sir,” she said in a tight voice.

She stood still while V’Ginn injected the monitor and took an initial scan of her hormone and neurotransmitter levels. “This cannot be right,” he said, staring down at the results of the scan. “How long have you been in here? Surely you must have found the time to…” He trailed off, looking at her with a frown.

“To?” Rwiari prompted.

“To avail yourself of some companionship,” V’Ginn said, his face heating once again.

“Ah. That.” Rwiari shrugged. “I tried to, as you say, ‘avail myself’ of some imports from one of those other programs you suggested for me, but it’s so far from real that I couldn’t go through with it. Like having sex with a doll.”

“Then perhaps you need to find yourself a sexual partner among the crew. I am certain that it will not be difficult to find someone willing.” He would be willing, if she asked him. But he did not think she would.

“Oh really? What makes you think that?” Her voice had gone harsh and sarcastic, a painful roil of emotions rising to the top of her mind, bursting through the blank wall that had surrounded it. “After all, I’m not the sort of mate a fine young Vulcan like yourself is looking for. Why should you think any other person on board this ship would hold me in higher esteem?”

V’Ginn flinched. “Rwiari…”

Rwiari sighed, and that tangle of painful emotion smoothed out and disappeared. “I'm sorry, doctor. That was unnecessary of me. I'll have to… to shop around a bit.”

“Do.” V’Ginn nodded stiffly and turned to leave the holodeck. And if, in some part of his mind, he suspected he had any sort of feelings about the fact that Rwiari might soon be having sex with some other person, he folded them away under the years of training he’d had at making them go away.


	7. Chapter 7

Rwiari had tried to find someone else. She really had.

Problem was, she seemed to be unusually fixated on a certain Vulcan doctor, and seeing him every day—and sometimes two or three times a day, if the first injection he gave her didn’t work—made it hard to consider the merits of anyone else.

But something had to change. Today, all day, she had been feeling flushed and overheated and unusually irritable, that foreign thing in her mind scraping her every nerve. She briefly considered going to the med bay for her fourth visit of the day, just to be certain that nothing was _really_ wrong, but the thought of facing the probable cause of her current state… no, that she could not manage. Of course, he was technically off-duty, but more often than not, V’Ginn could be found in his little lab off the med bay during his off-duty hours.

And if he were anywhere near the med bay… well, he would definitely poke his nose into any consultation she might try to do with just Dr. Stukov. Dr. Stukov might even pull V’Ginn in himself. After all, V’Ginn was the one who had been monitoring her condition.

The holodecks, she decided. They had been a disaster the last time she had attempted to use them for hormonal regulation, as V’Ginn would put it, but right now she needed a warm body, even if it wasn't real. She needed the illusion of being wanted by someone, anyone. “Computer, could you reserve a holodeck for me for the evening? Starting at 2200 ship time, and for at least the next couple of hours after that. Three or four if you can manage it. One of the small holodecks. For private use.”

“Holodeck Alpha has been reserved for four hours.”

“Thank you, Computer.”

And then Rwiari sat down at the console in her tiny civilian quarters and got to work designing a program that would hopefully provide her with the relief she needed.

Several hours later, Rwiari entered the holodeck and took a deep breath before calling out the name of the program she had just put together. Privacy controls engaged immediately as the program initialized… but they weren't enough to keep out one curious rogue hologram, apparently.

“Oh, so _this_ is what you were spending so many computer cycles on.” Hera materialized on the holodeck, looking around appreciatively. “Where is this?”

“Betazed. Hera, this really isn't the time.”

Hera ignored Rwiari’s second sentence and the politely phrased ‘go away’ it contained. “Why Betazed? Do you want to go back there?”

Rwiari looked around the garden she had brought to life, the lush greenery, the flowers, a little cabin half-hidden behind some trees in the distance, and she sighed. “I suppose I could return to the planet, but can't go back to this place. It doesn't exist any more. Not after the Dominion…” She paused and sighed again. “It doesn't matter. Please, Hera, could I have some time alone?”

“Is it really alone when you've programmed yourself some company?” Hera snapped her fingers, and suddenly the figure Rwiari had known was waiting in the cabin on the other side of the holodeck was in front of them. Hera looked the other hologram over and laughed. “Does V’Ginn know you're using his likeness like this?”

Rwiari flinched. She had made herself a Betazoid lover to match the setting, thinking that perhaps a member of her own species, even a holographic one, might help her engage with the encounter, but now that she saw the result of what she had programmed in… subtract a few centimeters of height, give him pointed ears and icy blue eyes, and anyone who didn't know V’Ginn well would probably have a hard time finding the differences between the two. “Not really what I intended,” she managed to squeak out.

“Let me fix that for you,” Hera said, a little smirk on her face. She snapped her fingers and the hologram reformed, and now there was no difference between V’Ginn and the hologram in front of her… or at least, not that she could perceive.

“Hera, I…”

“What, you think you're the only person who has ever done something like this on the holodeck? Please.” Hera rolled her eyes. “He’ll even be as cranky as the real thing. You seem to like that.”

Rwiari frowned. “Have you been _spying_ on me?”

Hera looked away, a little guilty. “Not spying. I just… I don't understand attraction. I'm trying to. I… I'm not human. But I'm not what he is either.” She gestured at the hologram of V’Ginn which was still standing between them. “I'm feeling things—all sorts of things—for the first time ever, and I don't even know what most of them are, let alone what to do with them. And you seem to know feelings best of anyone on this ship.”

Rwiari smiled in spite of her weariness and irritation. “I could help with that. Not tonight, though.”

Hera smiled back, her expression hopeful. “I would like that.” And then with a pop she was gone, Rwiari hoped for good, at least for the night.

The figure in front of her had come to life as Hera had left.

“So, are you really as cranky as the real thing?” Rwiari asked him.

“What a ridiculous question,” the hologram said in V’Ginn’s clipped tones.

“Do I ask any other kind?”

The hologram glared down his nose at her. “Never.”

Rwiari laughed. “Tell me, did Hera leave the rest of my program intact?”

Not-V’Ginn’s expression grew heated, and he looked Rwiari up and down with the barest hint of a smile playing at the corner of his mouth. “Perhaps you would like to take me to a bed and find out,” he growled, reaching for her. She did her best not to mind the stark blankness of his mind as he took her by the wrist and tugged her close. “Or perhaps you would like me to take you right here,” came a further murmur against her throat, as he pressed a hot, needy kiss there.

Rwiari shivered. “There’s a pallet in that cabin,” she said. “I would rather—” she didn't get any more words out before the hologram V’Ginn scooped her up in his arms and carried her towards the cabin. She wanted to protest that he would hurt himself… but of course, he was a hologram. No strained muscles here.

He set her down carefully on the pallet. And then, for the next little while, all he gave her was careful—gentle touches as he undressed her, gentle kisses as he used his hands and body to work her into a frenzy of want. Rwiari opened her mind as he did so and let herself pretend for a moment that this was really V’Ginn over her, that he wanted her as a mate, that he could take back this part of his mind that was still plaguing her, all these weeks later.

It didn't work, of course.

But she had to try.

V’Ginn shut the console in his lab down for the night with a sigh. No progress. Not that he had expected progress.

Some small part of him wondered if this was the payback of the Q he had refused. Wondered if he would never make progress because a force he could not stand against had determined that he should not.

V’Ginn shook his head to clear it and took a deep breath. Illogical nonsense. Best to keep to the explanation that his senses could confirm, to the physical world.

And thinking of those who lived in the physical world… V’Ginn picked up the tricorder that Rwiari’s data was being fed into and frowned at the current readout. She had been worsening for the past few weeks; every day, he had given her a new injection, and every day, she had seemed to be improving for several hours—sometimes more than half the day—but inevitably, her neurotransmitter levels would plunge or spike suddenly, erratically, disrupting the careful balance she kept in her mind.

After the first few times it had happened, he had asked her to remain in med bay for an hour or two after the injection so that he could monitor her, but he had been unable to find any issues with the uptake of the medications he had been using on her, and thus far she had refused to remain in med bay all day for observation. “You have your little monitor in me,” she had said. “But if you keep me trapped in here all day as well, that's a little too much like… you know.” At that he had felt a surge of pain from her, a memory of those years she had spent a prisoner, both physically and in her own mind, and for all that logic said that he ought to exercise his prerogative as the CMO and force her to submit to extended observation, he hadn’t quite been able to follow through. Instead he had insisted merely that she return to the medbay for further injections each day, should he determine it necessary, and after a token resistance, she agreed.

The entire situation left him with a sort of sick panic in his stomach, one no amount of meditation had been able to soothe away. He knew with a certainty that if he did not figure out what was wrong with Rwiari, these fluctuations would eventually kill her. They had already had deleterious physical effects on her body, and if those continued to worsen...

V’Ginn had scoured all the medical literature he could find on Betazoids and had found only that he was following the recommended treatment regime for imbalances of the sort Rwiari seemed to be experiencing. But the literature had also made it clear that such imbalances usually cleared themselves up within a few days, given the proper treatment. So there must be something else wrong with her, but every scan he had done, both physical and mental, had shown him no potential cause.

And today… today she had been running a low fever all day on top of the neurotransmitter imbalances. Her hormonal levels had remained more-or-less steady, but he had called her back to the medbay three times that morning to make minute adjustments to the medications that were helping to stabilize her neurotransmitters. He was still not satisfied with the result. But what else could he do?

He hesitated for a moment, and then, instead of leaving the tricorder with one of the on-shift staff members as he had earlier in the week, he took it with him. After all, his staff would need to contact him anyway, should Rwiari’s vital signs stray too far from acceptable levels. He would simply set the tricorder to alert him audibly if such a thing should happen, and he would wake up in an instant.

There was nothing strange about taking such precautions, surely.

Some hours later, a loud ping woke V’Ginn, and a second sent him scrambling for the tricorder that was monitoring Rwiari’s vitals from afar, which he had set on his bedside table. The readings from the monitor he had injected in Rwiari were going wild; her hormone levels had spiked, her vitals—breathing and pulse especially—were erratic. V’Ginn tamped down a surge of panic and rolled out of his bed, snagging his emergency medkit as he did so.

“Computer, where is Rwiari?”

“Holodeck Alpha.”

He departed his quarters at a run; it was only sheer force of will that kept him from pacing the small space as he rode the turbolift to the floor the holodecks were on.

Rwiari had put on privacy controls, and V’Ginn hesitated at the door to the holodeck… then glanced down at the current readout of the monitor in his hand. If anything, her vital signs had grown even more erratic.

“Medical override, AH-”

“Are you sure you want to do that?” asked a quizzical voice. Hera’s head poked through the wall next to the access panel, swiftly followed by the rest of her. “Might not like what you see.”

“Is she all right in there?” V’Ginn asked, shocked by the desperation in his own voice.

“Depends on what you mean by all right.” Hera gave him a coy look. “She’s being awfully loud.”

“Medical override AH-34,” V’Ginn blurted out before he could think better of it. The door slid open, and beyond it he heard the low moan of Rwiari’s voice, somewhere beyond a garden full of massed greenery arranged in an artfully sculpted semblance of wildness. He was through the door in an instant, making for the little building that was just visible at the other edge of the holodeck, shadowed by trees. He was briefly surprised that Hera hadn't followed him, but the rest of him was focused entirely on getting to Rwiari as quickly as possible.

He didn't realize what he was looking at, not at first. And then, before his rational mind could react to the situation, he found himself snarling and grabbing the man who was over Rwiari by the neck, pulling him off of her and pinning him against the wall. Some small part of him registered that the man must be a hologram, but V’Ginn couldn't bring himself to care, because the man had been touching Rwiari and Rwiari belonged to _him_.

The only impression V’Ginn got of the man was one of dark hair and pointed ears before Rwiari said “Computer, end program,” in a breathless little voice. The man and the building disappeared, and V’Ginn found he was standing there in the middle of a holodeck with Rwiari at his feet, completely naked, a pile of her clothing discarded to one side. She snagged her dress and pulled it over her head, complaining all the while.

“What was that about? Why bother suggesting I use holodeck programs for relaxation purposes if you're just going to interrupt me every time?”

“Er,” was all V’Ginn managed to get out. He was still startled by his own violent actions towards the hologram. If it had been another person… he had been briefly overcome with the sort of murderous rage he had heard other Vulcans say they felt only when their mate was threatened, and he could easily have killed someone in it.

But the woman at his feet was not his mate.

And the man she had been with was not real.

Knowing both of those things did not make the rage that still simmered in his mind, barely leashed, any easier to rid himself of.

“Well?” Rwiari said irritably, getting to her feet. “Aren't you even going to apologize?”

“What do I have to apologize for? I was simply doing my duty,” V’Ginn said, forcing as much chill into his voice as he could, hoping desperately to hide the rage from Rwiari.

She gave him an incredulous look. “Your duty involves interrupting me during my recreation time? Recreation that _you_ prescribed?” She spat the last few words acidly in his direction, and it took all of his training not to flinch.

“Your readings were erratic,” he responded, forcing himself to maintain a cold, logical tone. “Well out of the ordinary, into dangerous ranges.”

“It’s called arousal,” Rwiari responded, her tone still snippy. “You didn't even let me get to the really exciting part.”

“If you had gotten any more excited, as you say, you could have damaged yourself.”

“I think I know my own limits better than you, doctor.”

“And if you are wrong, if you had lost control over your empathic powers, half the ship could have been hit by the backlash!”

Rwiari’s expression went heavy-lidded and sultry. “What fun for them. I'm sure you and Officer Eiffel could have had an excellent time together. Both of your quarters are well within that range, and actually feeling something for once might even make you tolerable.”

He flinched at the insult. “If you are not going to take this seriously, we may have to discuss dampening your mental powers once more.”

Oh. Oh, that he should not have said. All of the color drained out of Rwiari’s face, and she wobbled on legs that seemed to have lost their ability to support her. V’Ginn reached for her, but instead she took a step backwards from him.

“You might be right,” she said in a small, strained voice.

“Rwiari…” he reached for her again.

“No.” She turned away from him and fled the holodeck, and he did not dare follow.

V'Ginn sighed and looked around the holodeck, feeling as empty as it was. That had not gone well at all.

Quite inexplicably, he found himself suffering from a physical arousal, one that had started the instant he had pulled the hologram off of Rwiari and which had yet to subside. He glanced down at where his erection was tenting the front of his trousers with a frown. He certainly couldn't leave the room like this.

“Holodeck, engage privacy settings.”

“Privacy settings engaged.”

“Load V’Ginn program theta.”

The program filled the room with a cave on Vulcan, including an image of the mate he had never taken. Meditation was all well and good, he had learned during his first few pon farrs, but sometimes meditation needed assistance.

He reached for her, as he had done many times before… and jerked back again, hard, unable to bear the thought of… no. Clearly the only rational explanation was that he could not bring himself to touch her after betraying his bond with her, even if that bond had never reached the conclusion it had been meant to reach. The thought that the bond might have switched to someone else…

He paused the program. “Computer, please edit the T’Pak character.”

As he called off measurements and descriptions to the computer, he watched as, bit by bit, his mate-who-never-was was transformed into the woman who had just left the room… or at least a reasonable facsimile of her. He left the ears as they were, but by the time he was done, she was Rwiari in almost every aspect.

This time there was no hesitation as he reached for her.

Not-Rwiari smiled up at him as he pulled her into his arms, smiled and smiled as he undressed her, as he explored her body, as he worked in her until, with a low groan of satisfaction, he lost himself inside of her.And then, for a long while after, he lay there at her side, holding her close, reveling in the warmth of another living being, even if she wasn't real. Even if the woman he had patterned her after had not chosen him.

Of course, why would she have? He had not chosen her, after all. He remembered enough to remember those words, the harsh drag of breath he had taken as he spat them out. “I do not wish to form a mating bond with _you_.” And those words had been the truth. He hadn't wished for such a thing. It would have been completely illogical to wish for such a thing.

V’Ginn did not remember much of what had happened aboard the shuttle after he had thrown those fateful words at her, but he knew that Rwiari had closed her mind to him, so he tried not to mind the dull blankness he found as he reached for the mind of the woman beside him.

He was a fool for wanting more.

He always had been.


	8. Chapter 8

Rwiari didn’t know how she would be able to face V’Ginn the next day for her injections.

He had _seen_.

It would have been bad enough if he had seen the original character she had programmed, but Hera’s replacement… oh, that was so much _worse._ She could only hope that she had managed to end the program before the fact that he had been staring himself down had registered in V’Ginn’s mind.

She couldn’t sleep. Truth be told, she hadn’t slept well for weeks, not since that first night after she had returned from the Eupheme. She couldn’t sleep, and she couldn’t bring herself to leave her quarters, to expose herself to the grating emotions of the rest of the ship. She tried to meditate, poked and prodded and threw up walls around the thing infecting her mind, but the fever raged, and it sent her into motion, left her pacing her quarters like a caged beast.

She would beat this.

She must.

She did not have any other option.

And, in the end, that was enough to send her to the med bay the next morning… because without the small assistance V’Ginn was rendering, she would quickly be overrun.

V’Ginn had worried about how he would face Rwiari the next day, but it turned out that his concern for her as her doctor was enough to override any awkwardness there might have been. The fever did not break overnight, and by the time she came to the med bay the next morning, he was tense with worry.

He had followed every protocol in the book for issues of this sort, had tried some treatments of his own devising, had increased dosages to dangerous levels, but the imbalance was still worsening.

Worst of all, Rwiari was a terrible patient.

“I’m fine, I promise,” she was saying now, her tone irritable. “I’ve got control over my telepathy. Just figure out how to get the neurotransmitter levels balanced enough that I don’t start leaking thoughts while I sleep.”

“Speaking of sleep, when was your last rest period and how long did you sleep for?” V’Ginn asked, eying the dark circles around her eyes, grateful that they were in the middle of a shift change and the medbay was currently empty of staff other than himself. No need to expose the rest of his staff to an irritable empath, not when her mental control could slip at any moment.

“I took a nap earlier today. Not sure how long,” Rwiari said. She was still pulling her trick of blanking her mind out in his presence, but he thought she was being deliberately evasive… and it was worrying that she had not acknowledged that it was morning, at least by ship’s time. Had she been awake all night? Did she know what time it was?

“And before that?”

“Why does it matter?” Rwiari rubbed her hand over the back of her neck and shut her eyes, looking exhausted. “Look, doctor, if it will make you feel better, I’ll go take another nap now.”

“I am also showing some minor mineral depletions, and your blood sugar is low. Perhaps that would explain why you are so cranky today. When did you last eat?”

“I am not cranky!” Rwiari snapped, and then appeared to hear herself. “All right, I am cranky. And I don’t know. Check my replicator logs. You seem to be fond of invading my privacy like that.”

“Hm.” V’Ginn ignored the jab about her privacy. “Computer, please provide me with Rwiari’s replicator logs for the past two days.”

“No data exists,” chimed the computer’s pleasant female voice.

“What are you talking about, computer? I swear I had some… some…” Rwiari trailed off. “I just… haven’t been very hungry, I guess.”

“And you are still running a low fever.” V’Ginn set the tricorder down and suppressed a sudden surge of unease, his mind suddenly putting together a disturbing pattern. “Chemical imbalances, inability to sleep, inability to eat. If I didn’t know better, I would say these are the symptoms of some form of plak tow.”

“And just where would I have contracted Vulcan blood fever?”

V’Ginn frowned. “The most frequent cause is a side effect of an unfulfilled mating bond formed during pon farr. But as you successfully kept me from forming such a bond with you when we… when you…”

“When I rendered assistance in the matter of your pon farr,” Rwiari offered up drily.

“Indeed. As no mating bond was formed, even partially, it cannot have caused plak tow.”

“Ah. Yes.”

V’Ginn felt a break in the solid wall around Rwiari’s mind, and her own ripple of unease. “Rwiari?”

Rwiari gave him a guilty, anxious look. “You didn’t want it. You didn’t want _me._ But you didn’t… your mind was stronger than I was expecting, and I couldn’t hold everything out.”

“Explain.”

Rwiari gritted her teeth and looked away, focusing on a distant corner of the medbay’s floor. “I could feel you attempting to bond with me in some way. You were attempting to draw my mind to yours. And I knew I couldn't keep it out completely. So I… I pulled that inside my mind, caged it, made it chase its own tail… I’m explaining poorly.”

“Open your mind and show me,” V’Ginn said, reaching for her.

Rwiari jerked back. “I don’t _dare._”

He looked her in the eye. She was terrified of something, and he suddenly needed to know what. “These issues are minor for now. Correctable chemical imbalances, even if we must monitor them daily. Minor sleep deprivation, correctable malnutrition, a mild fever. But if they get worse, if you lose control over your mind…”

“Doctor, you don’t want me.” Rwiari’s mind was still a solid, blank wall to him, but her voice… he could not name the emotion, but it pulled on him all the same.

“Why does that have anything to do with you opening your mind to me?” he asked gently, hoping to coax an answer out of her.

Rwiari took a shallow breath, and then let out a small, desperate laugh. “Because if I open my mind too far in your presence I’ll lose control of it. It wants to go back to you. It wants to complete what it started.”

V’Ginn understood suddenly, her neurochemical imbalance, the walls she had been keeping up around her mind while in his presence. “You turned the mating bond in on yourself rather than allow it to complete what it had started.”

“Something like that, yes.”

V’Ginn frowned. “Computer, I need to see a map of Rwiari’s memory engrams.”

Rwiari sat silently as the computer scanned her, and when the scan was complete, V’Ginn looked at it with new eyes, pulling up the other scans he had taken of her mind over the past few weeks as he had tried desperately to find the reason for her deterioration. Now that he knew what he was looking for, it was obvious.

“There is a foreign engram here.”

“Yes.”

“It… appears to be acting in a parasitic manner, feeding off your own engrams, growing, crowding you out of your own mind.”

“I haven’t quite figured out how to neutralize it yet, but no worries, I’m sure I’ll get there eventually,” Rwiari said in the sort of falsely cheerful voice that people always used when trying to convince themselves of something they didn’t quite believe.

V’Ginn frowned. “It has been nearly a month since we had our shuttle accident. Tell me, have you made any progress since then?”

“Well, no, but—”

“We must resolve what we started in the shuttle.”

“_No._”

“What alternative do you propose, hm? You continue fighting it, growing more and more unwell?”

“Doctor, _you do not want me._” Rwiari’s voice held a tinge of panic now.

“I do not want you dead,” V’Ginn said, reaching for her. “And if this continues, that is where you will end up.”

“_No!”_ He felt a telepathic push that went straight to his nerves, making him recoil.

“Why not?”

“I am not going to take that choice away from you, doctor.”

“I am choosing this, right here, right now,” he said.

“Because your Vulcan brain thinks it’s the only logical solution!” Rwiari snarled. “But what about Officer Eiffel?”

“Officer Eiffel?” V’Ginn blinked, confused.

“Yes, Officer Eiffel. You know, the fellow you’ve been spending extra time with the past few weeks, who has been spending evenings in your quarters? That Officer Eiffel?”

V’Ginn shifted, uncomfortable. “I fail to see what relevance my personal relationship with Officer Eiffel has to this discussion.”

“V’Ginn, if you do this, if we… if I give this back to you, there won’t be a relationship with Officer Eiffel. This isn’t going to leave any room for it. For any physical relationship, not while I’m still alive.”

“Betazoid lifespans are considerably shorter than Vulcan ones. I shall live to mate with someone else,” V’Ginn said drily. "And I do believe you have the wrong idea about my relationship with Officer Eiffel. We realized long ago that we are not compatible in the long term.”

Rwiari huffed angrily. “There goes that Vulcan logic again. Though it’s failed to account for the fact that you and I aren’t any more compatible in any respect than you and Officer Eiffel are.”

V’Ginn had been edging himself closer to the medical exam table again, trying to get to Rwiari’s side without her noticing. But this statement in particular could not stand. “It is true I find you frustrating,” he said, taking a risk and leaning in close, almost nose-to-nose with her. “But I suspect we might not be as incompatible as you think.”

Kissing wasn’t a traditional form of affection for Vulcans, but he knew it was one that Betazoids shared with humans. So despite the fact that he had only the vaguest idea of what he was doing, he tilted his head slightly to one side and leaned just a little bit closer to brush his lips against Rwiari’s.

It felt like a dam breaking, Rwiari’s inner walls cracking and crumbling and falling away from around her mind. He brought his hands up to hold her face steady, to make the connection properly, his mind melding with hers, the engram of his that was tangled with hers coming free in a rush, and he felt it again, the urge to mate with this woman in front of him, to make her one with him in all possible ways. Rwiari’s mind was a whirl of confusion, of anguish… and, he was pleased to note, relief, as she released the mating bond back to him, as part of her followed it back to his mind, binding them together.

They had no thought for the fact that they were in the medical bay, that any member of the crew could walk in at any moment. They hardly even had the presence of mind to undress; she unfastened the trousers of his uniform, he shoved her dress up around her waist and pulled her undergarments to the side, and they coupled there in the open, with her still perched precariously on the edge of the exam table as they frantically tried to relieve the resurgence of the mating urge that had overcome them both once more. Perhaps fortunately, it was quick; V’Ginn found himself groaning and collapsing against Rwiari, and she held him upright as best as she could, her own breath coming in stutters and starts.

After a moment, logic took control again, and he pulled himself shakily away from her. She produced a handkerchief from somewhere and offered it to him, and he cleaned himself perfunctorily before handing the handkerchief back. Rwiari cleaned herself as well, then frowned at the handkerchief.

“We can feed it into the replicator,” V’Ginn said, holding his hand out for it. Rwiari handed it over without protest, and he went to put it into the replicator.

“What now?” Rwiari asked from behind him. She sounded lost and very confused.

V’Ginn turned and looked her over, the wrinkles on her face, the slightly rumpled folds of her dress, the disheveled state him shoving his hands into her hair had caused, and he wanted to go straight back to her and hold her to him. He dismissed it immediately as sentimental nonsense, but that did not change the fact that the urge was still there. “I think you should start spending nights in my quarters,” he said.

“A couple of nights a week, like Officer Eiffel?” Rwiari suggested with a cheeky grin.

V’Ginn shook his head, resisting the urge to correct her once again on his relationship—his growing friendship—with Doug. “Perhaps once this bond has settled. But right now, I do not think I will be able to sleep if I do not have my mate at my side.”

Rwiari’s expression turned guilty. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. It’s my fault that you were put in this situation, if I’d just been able to… to control my attraction to you a little better, or if I’d been able to wait just a little bit longer for _Hephaestus_ to find us when we were in the shuttle—”

V’Ginn crossed back to the exam table and leaned in to kiss Rwiari again, finding he was very fond of the way this particular expression of affection was capable of shutting Rwiari up, both physically and mentally. Her mind went soft and fuzzy the moment his lips met hers, and he let himself sink into the sensation. After a moment, Rwiari put her hands firmly to his shoulders and pushed him back.

“Having sex in the medical bay once was enough, doctor,” she said wryly.

He leaned his forehead against hers. “You should call me V’Ginn. Also…” He looked up. “V’Ginn to Captain Isa.”

“Isa here. Is something wrong in the medical bay, doctor?”

“No, things are slow here. I simply wished to inform you that I plan to take some leave for the rest of the day. The nurses should be able to manage most things, but I will be in my quarters if I am needed for an emergency situation before Dr. Stukov comes on duty for second shift.”

“Of course,” Isa said, her voice curious. “Can I ask why?”

“It is a personal matter.”

“Very well. Get on with it, I suppose.”

“Thank you, Captain.”

Rwiari appeared to be suppressing the urge to giggle. “You realize she’s going to figure out what’s going on sooner rather than later, don’t you?”

V’Ginn ignored her. “Computer, send a message to Dr. Stukov. I will be out of touch except for emergencies for next two shifts.”

“I mean, even if she weren’t telepathic and about as unprincipled with it as I am, she’s not _unintelligent_,” Rwiari continued.

V’Ginn continued to ignore her. “Computer, also pause the simulation running on console 4 in my lab. I will return tomorrow to deal with it at some point.” The computer beeped a confirmation, and V’Ginn grabbed Rwiari by the waist and pulled her off the table, then took her by the hand and pulled her along after him.

“It’s a good thing your quarters are on this deck,” Rwiari said, projecting amusement. “Goodness knows what would happen if we got on to a turbolift and found someone else there.”

“You really never shut up,” V’Ginn muttered.

~_Words are a specialty of Betazoids,~ _Rwiari shot at him telepathically.

~_Too many words,_~ V’Ginn sent back, pulling her into his quarters and swinging her around against the wall next to the door once they were through, pressing her back against it and kissing her into fuzzy warmth again. He unfastened his uniform jacket and shrugged out of it, letting it drop to the floor, sending his trousers quickly after it, then hiked her skirt up around her waist again and lifted her by the hips. She wrapped her legs around his waist, letting out a soft little moan into their kiss as he ground against her, pressing her harder against the wall.

~_I am going to take you like this~_ he sent, along with the burning lust he had started feeling—no, that had come properly to the surface of his mind, it had been there since he had met her—when she had released the mating bond to him. ~_And then we are going to make up for every missed opportunity we would have had over the past month. And then,~ _he found he was growling a little, faced with the sudden memory of the way his mate had been abusing her body as she’d tried to keep the mating bond from him, ~_I am going to feed you, and I am going to hold you while you sleep.~_

Rwiari laughed at that. “I think we might need more than a single afternoon of your personal time for that,” she said out loud, her thoughts too obviously disordered to send anything sensible to him telepathically. He felt a great burst of affection and sweetness and just a tinge of lust from her along with the spoken words, and it was the latter that had him reaching between them to shove her undergarments aside again and reposition himself so that he could thrust into her. And then there were no more words from either of them, spoken or mental, for a long time, just a spiral of relief, of joy, of belonging that left V’Ginn feeling euphoric, a feeling he did not try to fight for once.

She had almost been right. He had wanted her, but he also knew that he would not have chosen her, not without what had happened between them aboard the Eupheme.

But now that she was his, he wasn’t letting her go for anything, and he would do whatever it took to make sure she wouldn’t ever want to be with anyone other than him again.


	9. Chapter 9

By the time V’Ginn was done with her against the wall, Rwiari had gone relaxed and silly in his arms. He lowered her to the ground and her knees almost collapsed under her, a circumstance she found unexpectedly hilarious in her current state.

She was free.

She would never be free again.

And for as long as she lived, neither would he.

The horror of what she had forced on V’Ginn lead to a burst of hysterical laughter and a worried look from the man who was now her mate.

“You must sleep,” he said, supporting her as he guided her to his bed.

“Oh, probably,” she replied, exhaustion forcing a yawn from her lungs along with the words. “Can you get me the rest of the way out of this dress?”

V’Ginn found the fastenings of her dress and undid them for her. She stripped down to her skin and tumbled into his bed, falling asleep almost immediately, though some small part of her mind registered him tugging the blanket out from under her and tucking her in, and some time later joining her in the bed. He wrapped his arm around her middle and pulled her close, a warm glow emanating from his mind as he did.

_You belong here_, that glow said. _You are mine._

He was asleep when she woke again, though when she shifted and tried to sit up, his grip tightened around her middle, holding her fast. So instead she shifted and shuffled, turning in his arms so that she could look at him.

She hadn’t realized that he was always frowning, but the muscles of his face had relaxed as he slept. She reached up and traced the long swoop of one of his eyebrows in fascination. His eyes snapped open at that, but his usual frown didn't return. She, however, couldn't stop frowning.

She couldn’t quite stop herself from touching him again, either. She reached up and brushed a hand through his hair, then traced light fingers along the curve of his ear.

“You seem much improved,” he said quietly.

Rwiari couldn't find the words to respond, so she just nodded.

“I scanned you to be certain before joining you. The neurotransmitter imbalance seems to be correcting itself. And after what we did earlier this morning…” he slid his hand down her side and pulled her hips hard against his, a move that startled the breath out of her and left her longing for more intimate contact. “The hormonal issues should work themselves out in short order.”

_~I wish I could tell how much of this is real, and how much of it is your hormones overriding your logic.~_ Rwiari sent to him, unable to find her voice. His usual frown returned, and he focused intently on her, as if trying to find an answer in her face.

“I do not think that it is all hormones,” he said after a moment of studying her. He reached up and brushed a few curls away from her cheek, and she moved her hand to cover his, pressing his hand in place against her skin, interlacing her fingers with his. His breath caught and his face relaxed again, a gentle expression of wonder overtaking it.

And then her stomach growled, and the frown returned. “You have not been eating proper meals. Let me feed you.”

“I’m at that point of hungry where I don’t even know what I want to eat,” she confessed, wincing at the rusty creak of her voice and a little ashamed of the fact that she had been rendered so incapable of seeing to her basic bodily needs.

“Hm. Do you know anything about Vulcan dishes?”

Rwiari released his hand and smiled at him. She had grown used to Vulcan cuisine while Isa was young, though no doubt V’Ginn’s regional dishes of choice would be entirely different than those her niece preferred. “Enough to know I like them.”

He nodded and left the bed, pulling on a pair of loose trousers before he headed towards the replicator. “And could you ask it for Rwiari special order 172?” she called out, sliding from the bed herself and heading towards the door that seemed most likely to contain his bathroom behind it.

It did. When she was done in the bathroom, V’Ginn met her at the door, holding a silky robe, a peculiar expression on his face.

“I was expecting food,” he said, something almost like a smile crossing his face.

“Thank you,” she said, taking the robe from him and wrapping it around her. “I'm sure you know that Betazoids don't have the same nudity taboos that other species have, but I thought it might be easier to eat if I wasn't constantly bombarded by how distracting you find my body.”

V’Ginn’s almost-smile turned into a heated smirk as he looked her up and down. “If you think that robe makes me any less aware of how glorious your body is…” he murmured. And then her stomach growled again and all the heat was gone, replaced with worry. “You must eat.”

He herded her over to the table and pulled out the chair, and she found herself staring at a vast array of dishes, some familiar, some not, completely unsure of where to start.

V’Ginn obviously sensed her uncertainty. “Here, try this first,” he said, pushing one of the dishes in front of her and scooping up a small amount with a spoon. Somehow, she knew it was one of his favorites, and the unfamiliar burst of flavors on her tongue warmed her from the inside out.

“You like it?”

She nodded and smiled and sent him that warmth she had felt, and he gave her a hesitant smile in return.

“Try this next,” he murmured, scooping up another spoonful.

She let him feed her, little bits of this and that, not too much food for a stomach that had been empty more often than not these past weeks. And he let her fuss over him as well, an unexpected joy rising to the surface of his mind when she identified his favorite dishes and fed him in return.

It was as intimate as the sex had been, and V’Ginn’s mind was still giving off that warm glow of pleasure he had been emitting when he had joined her in the bed. She wanted to bask in it for as long as it lasted.

Because sooner or later, V’Ginn would remember that he had not wanted her, and then she would never feel it again.

“You have a briefing soon, don't you?” Rwiari asked when they were done eating.

V’Ginn had forgotten about it entirely. He sighed. He wanted nothing more than to take the day off and take Rwiari back to his bed. So far, their sex had been frantic, hard and fast and meant entirely to soothe the initial rush of lust from the mating bond snapping in to place between them, but things had finally calmed enough in his mind that the urge to stake his claim on her had subsided somewhat, replaced by the urge to give her a reason to bind herself to him for life.

Not that either of them really had a choice about that now. For as long as Rwiari lived, V’Ginn knew he would not be able to take another person as a mate in any sense, and if the mating bond had even a quarter of the same effect on her as it was having on him, the same would be true of her. She was bound to him, for as long as they both might live.

Most likely, given the difference in lifespans between their two species, for as long as she lived. And suddenly, he was struck by the fact that she was nearly halfway through the lifespan allotted a Betazoid… while he was not even a quarter of the way through the natural lifespan of a Vulcan. If he was lucky, he would spend another quarter of his life with her, or perhaps even as much as a third, but at some point, she would die, and most likely well before he did himself.

He had heard of Vulcans going mad when their mates died prematurely.

He was already worried that he might be one of them.

“V’Ginn?” Rwiari’s voice cut through his worries and returned his attention to her. He could do nothing about the fact that fifty, sixty years from now she would be dead and gone. But he had more than enough saved leave to take another day off and spend it with her. And he would.

“Computer, please inform Captain Isa that I wish to take a day of leave to deal with personal business, and then stop all non-emergency communications to me for the rest of the day,” V’Ginn said, staring intently at Rwiari. Her mouth had fallen open a bit at the request he'd made of the computer, and it was obvious she was considering what all they might be able to get up to with an entire day to explore one another. “Make that two days,” he said, hearing his own voice go rough with want.

“Please clarify,” the computer responded.

“Inform Captain Isa that I wish to take two days of leave before I next return to duty,” V’Ginn clarified, his gaze still fixed on Rwiari.

The breaths she was taking now were shallow and quick, her eyes wide, her mind full of erotic nonsense that left him certain that she wanted him as much as he wanted her. It left him wondering what her answer would have been to that question she had asked him after he had woken up. How much of this was her hormones, overriding her natural dislike of him? Was there anything but lust between them?

He did not dare ask that question of her. He might wonder about the answer, but he did not truly wish to know it. Because if he knew it, he might have to accept that as much as he wanted this woman, this bond could have no future. He would have to accept that this might be all he would have of her, and that sooner or later meditation and the holodeck would once again be his only recourse when the fires of pon farr burned bright in his mind.

If he never knew her answer to that question, he could pretend that he would feel this sense of belonging forever.

“Come to bed with me.”

She nodded and stood, and he was behind her in an instant, sliding fingers under the neckline of that silky robe she was wearing. It clung to her like the robe she had been wearing weeks ago when he had gone to yell at her, when he had thought she had manipulated Doug into attempting to grow the friendship between them, and it had a very similar effect on him as that robe had, sending him silly with lust for the body it did very little to conceal.

“This robe is marvelous,” he murmured against the side of her neck. He felt a shiver travel down her spine as he nuzzled her gently, a second as he pressed a kiss to what seemed to be a very sensitive place behind her ear. And all the while her mind glowed, a warm, bright feeling that embraced him as he reached for her with his mind as well as his body.

“It’s just a robe.” Rwiari’s voice was low and breathy, as if she could barely get enough air into her lungs to respond to him. “Ohhhh.” She let out a long, gentle sigh as V’Ginn slid his hand deeper into her robe, tracing the curve of her breast down to her nipple, which, given the way him touching it made her surface thoughts lose all coherence, must be very sensitive indeed.

It gave him an idea, one he would definitely need to lay her down for. Already her body was sagging back against his, her knees barely holding her weight; if she relaxed any more, she would end up on the floor and he would not be able to stop it.

“Come,” he said, pulling her back upright. He wrapped his arm around her waist and they stumbled over to his bed, falling awkwardly on to the surface together when he could not quite bring himself to let go of her.

“Do you trust me?” he asked, stroking a hand down her side, cupping the curve of her hip, enjoying the feel of her body beneath that silky robe.

“Trust you?” she echoed, raising an eyebrow.

“My profession has ensured that I know anatomy quite well, but I have never been with another telepath before.”

A little smirk crossed her face, just for a moment. “Ah. I have.” And then her hand was over his where it rested against her hip, and she was stroking her fingers gently along the side of his. He felt, just for a moment, only the soft pleasure of the physical contact… and then, so subtly he had not realized it was happening, Rwiari's mind slipped into his, her mental fingers brushing directly against the pleasure center in his brain, sending a jolt through every nerve ending in his body that had him gasping for breath and falling flat against the mattress.

“Not… fair…” he managed.

She only smirked again. “Your turn. Let’s see if you can follow the impulses, hm?”

It took practice. Her mind was foreign to him, though he was clearly not the first Vulcan she had ever done this with. But bit by bit, he figured out how to find what he wanted, bit by bit, he learned how to make her gasp with pleasure just from the touch of his mind within hers.

That it was sex, he was certain. That it was also an intimacy he had never experienced, had never hoped to experience with another person, two minds made into one in their pursuit of pleasure, he was also certain. Even when they both lay gasping and sweaty against the bed, utterly wrung out from their encounter, he could not resist reaching for her with his mind.

Her mind caught and cradled his as he reached for her, the activity of her thoughts a gentle hum around him, even as she sent herself to him in the same way. He felt her mental flinch as she encountered the part of his mind that even now was busy, going about its work in dulling the volcanic fierceness of his emotions, and he tried to bring it to a halt.

_~No,~_ her voice echoed within his mind. _~I know what you are, and you cannot change that part of yourself without becoming something else entire.~_

He would change it for her, if that would keep her by his side… but that thought he buried deep. It would be too much for her, he sensed. For all that their mating had brought relief to the ill that had been plaguing her, he still felt her guilt each time he touched her mind, a firm belief that she had forced this on him.

But he had forced himself on her first, his mind overcoming hers in the heat of his pon farr, shoving this bond that was now strung tight between them into her mind.

That thought had him withdrawing from her, first mentally and then physically, pulling away from her and sitting up in bed, needing a moment of space to let his mind dull the initial fierceness of that sting of guilt.

“Is something wrong?” Rwiari’s eyes were wide with worry, the surface of her mind roiling with the emotion before he felt her smooth it away.

“Nothing,” he forced himself to respond as he sought an excuse for his sudden withdrawal. “I simply wish to do another scan. I want to be certain that you have continued to stabilize.”

Rwiari laughed and relaxed. “You will always be a doctor first, I see.”

He found himself smiling down at her. “If I were always a doctor first, I would not have brought you to my bed again without another scan.”

The look she was giving him was so meltingly fond that he was suddenly uncomfortable. Oh, he did not deserve that look. Not from a woman who was only here at his side because she had been given no other choice. He turned abruptly away from her and located his medical tricorder.

She was almost back to optimum. It would take time for her to regain the weight she had lost in the bout of plak tow she had experienced while holding the mating bond from him, but her neurotransmitter levels had returned to a proper balance.

Her hormones, on the other hand… well, she was definitely a female Betazoid in the middle of the phase. And she was currently eyeing him with more than a fair amount of lust, staring across the room to where he was standing as he studied the results of her scan on a console.

“I’d forgotten how nice your butt is. Bring it back over here,” she called to him.

V’Ginn raised an eyebrow. “And this is your idea of a seduction?”

“No, this is.” Rwiari propped herself up on one arm on the bed, that silky robe she was still wearing slipping off her shoulder, exposing the upper curves of her breasts. “Come back to bed, V’Ginn,” she purred in a low, raspy voice.

Well.

That would definitely do the trick.

He abandoned the console—along with his guilt, at least for the moment—and returned to the bed.


	10. Chapter 10

Whether or not V’Ginn felt for her in any other way might still be in question, but the culmination of this physical attraction between them was so exquisite that Rwiari couldn't quite bring herself to care, at least not at this moment. He could not look at her without a rush of lust surging to the forefront of his mind, could not touch her without his appreciation of her form made apparent by unexpected reverence.

When he returned to bed, he seemed determined to find every physical point of contact that caused her pleasure, setting to it in the same methodical fashion as he had set to finding every point of pleasure in her mind. There was something charming about it, the rigid logic of the way he seemed to form hypotheses about what she enjoyed, only accepting them as fact when repeated testing brought the same results.

She had worried that he would be too afraid of hurting her again to be anything but too gentle. Fortunately, it did not seem likely that he would fall prey to such an assumption. When he finally seemed to lose patience with his own methodical exploration of her body, when his own desire reached a fever pitch, he plunged himself into her with a fierceness that would have been frightening if not for the rigid control she could sense underneath.

They spent the two further days of leave V’Ginn had taken in much the same way as this first one had gone, sleeping and eating and having sex in turn. V’Ginn broke the pattern every once in a while to pull out that medical tricorder of his. She assumed that she was well on her way to a full recovery, given the contented noises he made every time he reviewed the results of one of these scans, but that didn't stop him from taking every opportunity to fuss over her.

There were no interruptions. V’Ginn seemed to take this as a sign that there had been no emergencies; Rwiari remembered Isa’s frequent complaints that her CMO never took the leave that had been allotted to him, and kept quiet her assumption that the captain of the ship would not have interrupted V’Ginn for anything but the most dire of medical emergencies.

And they did not talk.

Oh, that wasn't to say that there weren't words exchanged between them. Of course they spoke to one another. But as to what would happen next, after this short break from real life ended? They said nothing.

Perhaps there was nothing to say. Perhaps once this break from reality ended, they would return to what they had been, the pair of them circling one another cautiously from a distance, linked only by their loyalty to the captain of this ship.

Rwiari could not help but be cautious with V’Ginn as a result. She wanted to open her mind entirely to him, wanted to show him the deepest, most secret parts of herself… but not yet. Not until she knew that this was more than lust, not until he was ready to let her in as well. For all the time they spent in one another’s minds, neither of them seemed in any hurry to allow the other deeper than the surface thoughts that any casual scan could pick up.

Finally, though, they reached the morning when V’Ginn needed to return to duty. A duty roster had appeared on his console the night before; he would start the day early, with a briefing before first shift, and would be on call and expected to be in his lab until second shift drew to a close.

Would he want her to come visit him? Would he want her to vacate his quarters once he was gone? Such questions had plagued her for the past day, though she could not bring herself to ask them. Their pressure on her mind left her sleeping fitfully, not tossing and turning but waking up several times in the night all the same. Each time she woke, she reached for V’Ginn, and each time he tucked her close to his chest, the warm glow of his mind—of the mating bond between them—soothing her anxiety.

She was not sure if he slept or not. If he did sleep, he woke as she did, and oh, there was one more thing to feel guilt for where this man was involved.

Finally, close to morning, at least by ship time, she finally fell into a deep, dreamless sleep. She woke to V’Ginn bending over her, his lips brushing a soft kiss to her temple. He was back in his uniform for the first time in the past few days, and that frown that she now knew was not his face’s natural state had taken up residence there once again.

He stroked several curls away from her face as she blinked blearily up at him. “Will you stay?” he asked, his voice achingly soft.

“In your quarters?” she responded, her own voice rusty with sleep.

He nodded. “Yes.” His fingers traced a path down her cheek. “I am finding it difficult to leave your side. I…” he laughed suddenly, a sound she had heard for the first time over these past few days, and which she now savored. “It is the most illogical thing. But I feel that if I know my mate is safe in my home and well-fed, I will be able to leave your side for this little while.”

Sixteen hours alone in his quarters was not going to feel like a little while, but knowing that he wanted her to stay sent a surge of relief through Rwiari. “I will stay.”

She had not realized how tense he had been until her words seemed to relax every muscle in his body, until she felt his answering surge of relief. “I have programmed the replicator to produce regular meals. You will eat?”

“Of course.”

“Good. You are still almost ten kilograms below optimum weight for your metabolism.” That frown of his deepened, and when she reached for his mind she found guilt, and anger at himself for not realizing what had been ailing her before it had had such deleterious effects on her body.

“And I definitely will not be gaining that amount back in one day, but I will eat properly. I promise.” She combed softly through that guilt and anger with a gentle touch to his mind, sending him the contentment she felt in that moment, the warm glow of being well-cared-for that his fussing had filled her with.

“Good,” he said once more, a smile replacing that frown for just an instant. “I should go before I give in to the urge to touch you again. I am not certain I will be able to leave if I do.”

Rwiari couldn't help but laugh. There that lust was again.

And he did look very good in his uniform.

Before she could give in to the urge to pull V’Ginn back down to her and strip him out of it, she waved him away. “Shoo. Off to your briefing. I will be here.”

There was a last gentle touch to her mind, and then he was gone.

V’Ginn was the first member of the command staff to reach the briefing room, and he gave in to the urge to ask the computer about Rwiari’s current location while he was alone in there. To his relief, she had remained in his quarters. Somehow, he had not expected her to truly do so.

After all, she had always seemed to take great pleasure in openly defying him in the past.

The rest of the command staff on first shift filtered in, last of all their Captain. Isa met V’Ginn’s eye with a look that said louder than spoken words or telepathy could that she wanted to speak privately with him after the briefing. She would no doubt want some explanation for his absence these past few days. V’Ginn considered what he would be able to reveal to his captain, and found himself hoping he could put her off for a day or two more. The mating bond between him and Rwiari was still so new, still felt so tenuous, for all that he knew that only death could break it now. He simply wanted a little more time for it to settle.

The briefing was mercifully short and to the point; they were to continue on the course heading they had been keeping to for the past few days until further notice. Third shift had been uneventful, and, barring any unfortunate accidents, it sounded as if first shift would be as well.

He was not certain whether or not to feel grateful for that. If he were busy dealing with an emergency, he would not be able to spend so much time thinking about what to do about the enigmatic woman waiting in his quarters. For all she had seemed relieved when he had asked her to stay, he could not bring himself to trust that relief. Perhaps she had just been relieved that he would be gone.

The briefing ended, but V’Ginn remained hunched over the the data pad that Lieutenant Ch’Lahhrt had handed him, full of reports on the past few days aboard the ship. He found himself frowning over the report from medbay, barely registering as the rest of the officers filtered out, until at last it was just him and Captain Isa.

“I would consider several of the things in this report medical emergencies,” he protested.

“V’Ginn, you have not taken any personal leave time in the past four years,” came Isa’s dry response. “I wasn't going to interrupt you for anything short of a Borg attack.” She tilted her head to one side, considering him thoughtfully. “It seems to have done you some good. You seem more… relaxed. More—” he felt the brush of her mind against his and felt a sudden jolt of surprise from her before she smoothed it out of existence. “You have a mate.”

Time to dissemble. “I have since you have known me.” Technically the truth.

“That was a childhood bond. You're mated properly now.”

Ah. He had not realized that it would be so obvious to an outside observer. He inclined his head, a short affirmative jerk.

Captain Isa smiled at him, the sort of smile that always came to her face when she was about ready to start teasing him. “So, who’s the lucky crew member? Should I have congratulated Officer Eiffel at the start of the briefing? Or have you been smuggling Vulcans on board?”

It was teasing, but of the sort that left him certain she would keep pestering him until he gave her an answer. “Neither,” he began, retreating into stuff formality. “Miss Ibreten and I have—”

A sudden look of horror crossed Isa’s face, and she interrupted him, already shoving past him towards the door as she called to the computer. “Computer, where is Rwiari Ibreten?”

“Rwiari Ibreten is in Dr. V’Ginn’s quarters.”

Isa was already out the door, and V’Ginn bolted after her, filled with a sudden terror. What could possibly have caused Isa to have such a reaction? She might give in to the Betazoid penchant for excessive emotionality from time to time, but her foundation was pure Vulcan logic. If she was reacting like this to the news that Rwiari was now his mate…

He skidded into the turbolift at Isa’s side the instant before the doors closed. “Captain, what is wrong?”

Isa gave him an impatient look, as if expecting him to already know the answer to that question. “She’s your mate now. A fully bonded mate.”

“Yes.”

“Which means pon farr.”

“Yes, of course it—Captain!”

The turbolift doors had opened once more, and Isa was already through them, running down the hall towards V’Ginn’s quarters. He reached his door before Isa and signaled it to open, wound so tight with his own fear that when he saw Rwiari through the doorway, just standing up from the couch with a smile on her face, he launched himself at her, pulling her tightly against him, burying his face against her neck with a low, possessive growl.

“Hush. It’s all right. She’s just worried about me.” The gentle touch of Rwiari’s mind broke through his fear for her, and the gentle stroke of her fingers through his hair calmed him further.

“Why?” His voice was harsh in his throat, and he had been reduced to single syllables, his every nerve still jangling with the need to protect his mate, a directionless urge seeking some foe to defeat.

He could not see it, but he could tell that Rwiari had glanced Isa’s way. “Do you want to tell him, or shall I?” Rwiari’s question was nonchalant, but her emotional state was anything but.

“I'll tell him,” came Isa’s curt response. “We should both get back on duty.” Her voice softened, and for a moment she was talking to Rwiari as family, not as the captain of the ship. “You're all right with this, though? Really?”

A brief mental flicker from Rwiari made him suspect that she was exchanging some private telepathic message with Isa. But all she said out loud was “I'm fine. Perhaps a little stiff, but…”

“Oh, no. No, I don't need to hear any more.” Isa’s voice was once again that of the captain. “V’Ginn. Time to go.”

V’Ginn kept his face buried against Rwiari’s neck for a long moment more, and then let out a sigh, releasing her from his grasp but reluctant to leave her. His body was still alert for whatever danger faced his mate, and it left him wanting to throw himself between her and the world.

“I'll be here,” Rwiari said. V’Ginn stared intently at her, feeling the truth of that intent in her mind. She took his hand in hers, intertwining their fingers, and he bent and kissed her before pulling back just enough to press his forehead gently to hers.

His body was having a predictable reaction to having his mate close, but he knew he could not linger. He would not be able to leave again if he did. Not for the next two hours or so, at least. But when he finally released Rwiari and turned back to Isa, his captain averted her gaze awkwardly.

“You know what, maybe I should just… give you two a moment,” she said, backing towards the door.

V’Ginn shook his head, as much to clear it as to negate the captain’s statement. “I will… it will subside,” he said, following her out of his quarters.

“You have a story to tell me,” he said once they were in the hallway.

“When we reach your lab,” she responded, staring straight down the hallway ahead, obviously still reluctant to look at him.

A few minutes later, V’Ginn had relieved Dr. Stukov, and then went straight to his lab, impatient to understand why his captain had reacted in such a way to the news that her aunt had become V’Ginn’s mate. “Well?”

Isa sighed, the sound a little sad, a little weary. He could tell that this was not a story she enjoyed telling. “You ever wonder how someone like me happens?”

“Like you?”

“A Betazoid-Vulcan hybrid.”

V’Ginn frowned, trying to remember the contents of Isa’s medical records. “Your parents are listed as deceased on your record.”

“Yes.”

“They were mated?”

Isa shrugged, a move that should have been nonchalant but which was stiff with old trauma instead. “I don't know,” she said, another weary sigh coming out with the words. “I know that my mother was mated to another Vulcan before she met my father. I know that her first mate died in a shuttle accident shortly before their second pon farr. I know that she was prescribed recreation to help soothe her grief, and went to Risa for it, and that her pon farr occurred despite the fact that her mate’s death should have suppressed it that cycle. And I know that in the aftermath, the man who fathered me wound up dead.” Isa sighed. “But as to what actually passed between them…no. I know nothing of that, except that my mother lived just long enough to bring me almost to term before her metabolism could no longer sustain us both. And then, after I was… was removed from her, my uncle Selek says it was as if she just slipped away. The damage to her mind was too great, and no medical intervention was enough.”

V’Ginn felt his frown digging its way deeper into his face as Isa spoke those words, but had no response for her. His mind was busy running scenarios, this one and that, trying to imagine for himself what had happened. Isa took his silence as a sign to continue.

“My father only had one living family member at the time of his death.”

“Rwiari,” V’Ginn offered up quietly. There was no one else it could have been.

“Yes. She was the one who had to identify his body. She was the one who had to come back to Vulcan and claim family rights in the trial.” Isa sighed. “Ri didn't blame my mother for what had happened. She had this theory, you see. Ri thought that it was likely that… that my father had acted on some attraction to my mother and whatever empathic signals he was sending as a result triggered her pon farr and an attempt to form a mating bond. Only, Ri thought that in their case, the attempt at cementing a mating bond between them overwhelmed my father’s mental defenses to the point of irreparable damage, and that the blowback damaged her in return. No blame on either side, just a happenstance of the respective biologies of a Vulcan and a Betazoid clashing, with a side of the grief my mother was trapped in after the death of her original mate.” Isa paused and took a deep breath. “But we don't know for sure. My mother was not lucid enough to testify at that point, so whatever really happened died with them.”

V’Ginn let out a low hiss of breath. Was that what Rwiari had been thinking, all those weeks ago aboard the Eupheme, when she had suggested that the start of his pon farr was her fault?

“So you see why I was worried about Ri.”

He did. V’Ginn’s jaw tensed, barely able to hold in his guilt now. “Captain, I… I cannot guarantee that something similar did not happen here.”

Isa shook her head. “I'm no longer worried about it. You both made it out alive and emotionally stable, and you aren't two unsupervised civilians on a pleasure planet. This is a starship. If you really hadn't wanted Ri as your mate, if either of you thought there was any true danger in it, you would have come to me and asked for my help in keeping you away from each other until your pon farr had ended.”

“No. We could not have.” V’Ginn sighed, and the rigid control he had been keeping over his body released all at once. He slumped backwards against a console, burying his face in his hands, a sudden surge of anguish overwhelming his mind. “My pon farr was almost a month ago,” he added in a small, tight voice. “We might not have completed the mating until two days ago, but the actual biological process that sparked it…”

Isa knew immediately what he was alluding to. “…happened while the two of you were trapped on the Eupheme, didn't it.”

“Yes.”

“I see.” Isa paused for a moment, and he felt the gentle brush of his captain’s mind against his own. “If it's any consolation, I think she would have chosen you anyway.”

“You cannot know that.”

“She likes you. And she’s always been attracted to you.” Isa was silent for a moment, but V’Ginn could not bring himself to look up, to read her thoughts from her face or mind. “I wasn't sure before, but the way you're reacting to this makes me suspect that your interest in her is much the same,” she added, breaking the silence. “It's a solid enough base to build a relationship on.”

“She never had a choice, Captain. Or she did, at least for a short while, and the choice she made then…” V’Ginn’s voice caught in his throat. He was too overcome by his emotions to speak, a dangerous state for a Vulcan. He pressed hard against the grief, the anger, the guilt, the anguish, letting the process he had learned so long ago it was second nature take over, pulling those emotions deep inside and disarming them. “The choice she made then was to pull the mating bond into her own mind, to try and neutralize it there. But she could not.” He lowered his hands from his face and stood straight, his mind once again returned to clear, logical order, his surface thoughts, at least, as free of emotion as they always were. “It was making her ill. It would have eventually killed her. We—no, I—made the only choice that would result in her surviving this. But it was never her choice.”

Isa sent another little mental probe his way, and winced at whatever it was she found there, though her touch was so subtle that he could not tell what had made her react so.

“I think you're wrong,” she said finally. “I don't know why Ri did what she did, but you're wrong if you think she would not have chosen you if this had happened in another way. Not if you had also chosen her.”

V’Ginn flinched at those last words. He had not chosen Rwiari. Not in the moment, not when it mattered. He could still remember her flinging his own words back at him on the holodeck, when he had suggested that she find some other person aboard the ship to have sex with: “I'm not the sort of mate a fine young Vulcan like yourself is looking for. Why should anyone else hold me in higher esteem?”

He knew that no amount of choosing her now would ever undo that first, fatal rejection.

“Well,” Isa said, obviously sensing the direction of his thoughts. “You can't undo what's been done. So you need to accept it and try to find some peace with it, however you can.”

“I know.” V’Ginn turned away and started opening files on his console, knowing he would not be able to work but wanting the semblance of it as a comfort. “I should get to work, Captain.”

For just a moment, he thought that Isa was going to object. But all she said was “Get on with it, then.”


	11. Chapter 11

Rwiari had not realized that her new link with V’Ginn would make it possible to feel him, even at a distance. Not that it was very far to the medbay from V’Ginn’s quarters, but her usual range was much less than that unless she was actively reaching for someone.

From V’Ginn’s emotional reactions—pure, strong, painful—it was obvious that Isa’s talk with him was not going well. But it was worse when his emotions died down, because Rwiari could feel the itch of them being suppressed. It left her pacing his rooms, picking up one thing and then another, examining them, setting them back down. If he had been there with her, she would have tried to lull him into a proper calm, would have sifted through his thoughts and helped him calm them rather than this violent snuffing out of emotion, the cudgel that most Vulcans used on their own minds. But from a distance, she shied away from touching his mind so intimately.

The door chimed. Isa.

“Come in!”

Isa entered and stood there, at attention, her face smooth but the surface of her mind concerned. “Auntie Ri.”

“It’s all right, darling. I can tell.”

“He didn't choose you.”

Oh. Not the thing that Rwiari had expected Isa’s concern to be about. “No. I…” Rwiari let out a harsh little laugh. “I was greedy. I know I should have tried harder to hold him off until the Hephaestus got there…”

“That’s not—” Isa shook her head. “No. I don't think that you took advantage of him. Not on purpose. If you hadn't repaired the communications system when you did, it could have easily taken us another week to find you, assuming Starfleet Command didn't send us orders that would have forced us to call off the search. And I can't imagine either of you had an easy time concentrating once his pon farr kicked off.”

“What is it, then?”

“You feel things so much more strongly than most people do. I just… I don't want to see you get hurt.”

Rwiari tried to laugh again and instead it turned into a gasping sob. She doubled over herself, tears she had been holding back for weeks suddenly coursing down her cheeks. Isa was at her side in an instant, wrapping firm arms around her, holding her as tightly as Rwiari had always held Isa when she had been a lost, scared child who had needed someone to show her how to feel.

“You love him, don't you,” Isa said quietly, rocking Rwiari gently in the hug.

The statement only brought more tears. Of course. Of course she loved him. Of course she had fallen in love with a stubborn Vulcan doctor who spent too much time buried in his research and not enough time being a person. It was just her luck.

“It’s really quite hopeless,” Rwiari sobbed out. “Because I don't even register on his radar if I'm not annoying him.”

“Ri, you're one of the best programmers I've ever met. Has it ever occurred to you that you could, I don't know, offer to help him with some of his simulations?”

Rwiari lifted her head and snuffled, wiping her cheeks dry with the sleeve of her robe. “Like he’d take my help.”

“Maybe he would if you weren't constantly antagonizing him.” Isa sighed. “Look, you're mated. You’re going to have to work out how to work together as a couple. Maybe part of that could be learning how to work together in a more literal sense.”

“Assuming he wants to work on a relationship of any kind with me. I wouldn't blame him if he would rather spend the rest of my life just meeting up every seven years to handle that little biological urge of his and then parting ways again.” Rwiari remembered V’Ginn’s comments about his past pon farr—or was that pon farrs?—and was even more disheartened. “Or maybe not even that. He seems to be of firm resolve in that part of his life, provided he has access to a holodeck and time to meditate.”

“So, what, you're going to give up before you've even started? That doesn't sound like you.”

“You've never seen me in love before.” The last time she had fallen in love had been long before Isa was born. Something in Rwiari had broken when her cousin had died the way he had, and she had not fallen in love since. Not until now. .

Once, sex and love had been intertwined parts of her life. Once, to take someone to her bed was to love them with her entire being, even if it was only a flighty, ephemeral love. But that had changed, and after the years she had spent mourning her cousin, after the years she had spent making Isa’s well-being the center of her world, after the years she had spent not entirely in control of her own actions… well. She had certainly never expected to love that way again.

Isa was giving her a peculiar look, so Rwiari did her best to explain. “It never lasted. It was never meant to. It burned too bright and hot for that. Glorious while it did last, but…”

“Maybe you've learned moderation in your old age.”

Isa sounded as if she were trying to tease Rwiari into a better mood, and it was almost working. Rwiari forced a smile to her face and cheer to her surface thoughts. “You should get back to work, darling girl. You have a ship to captain.”

Isa smiled back, though a slight wrinkle of worry still lingered between her eyebrows. “And being the captain means I'm allowed to take whatever time I need to make sure my aunt is all right. Especially when I was a bad niece who didn't notice when you disappeared into my CMO’s quarters for three days.”

“I'm sure you were busy.”

Isa rolled her eyes. “You have no idea. On the plus side, the Federation has a new, if somewhat tenuous, trade agreement with the Ferengi.”

“A minor miracle.”

“Easy enough when they don't know how to guard against telepaths.”

Rwiari blinked, startled out of the remainder of her bad mood. “You…?”

Isa looked awkward and rubbed her hand across the back of her neck. “Ah, yeah. Guess I didn't tell you about that. Ever since I drove off that Q, I've been feeling as if it… as if it unlocked something in me. I still had a heck of a headache for hours after because it’s awfully noisy in there, but I can read them. Well enough to do the unexpected, at least.”

“Mm. May I?” Rwiari reached for her niece’s mind, brushing lightly at the surface thoughts.

_~Go ahead. I need the reassurance, even if Dr. Stukov gave my brain scan the all clear.~_

Rwiari slipped in through the gap Isa opened in her usual protections around her mind and took a look. It was always fascinating to her, seeing the connections Isa had made in her mind to fuse together the two sides of her heritage; it was an ordered chaos, or perhaps a chaotic order. It shifted around Rwiari, constantly changing and perfectly still and at balance all at once, a contradiction given form and substance and action.

“Everything looks stable,” Rwiari said out loud, slipping back out of her niece’s mind. “But you might ask V’Ginn to take a second look from the Vulcan perspective.”

“I will. Once he’s calmed down a little. Hopefully you can help with that, once he gets off shift.”

Rwiari felt a sudden surge of anxiety at the thought, and did her best to tamp it down before any of it could make its way to V’Ginn. “I'll try my best,” she said, putting her best smile on for her niece and getting a dubious look in response. “Now you get back on duty.”

“Fine. I suppose I can't delay any more.”

As if in response to this statement, Isa’s com badge chirped. “Bridge to Captain Isa.”

“Isa here. What is it?”

“We've picked up a transmission that you should probably take a listen to.”

Isa was already to her feet and halfway out the door, pausing only long enough to glance back at Rwiari with an apologetic look. Rwiari heard Isa’s steady “On my way,” as the doors to V’Ginn’s quarters swished shut behind her niece.

And then, Rwiari was alone with her thoughts.

Fortunately, she realized a few minutes later that one of the enhanced amenities included in the CMO’s quarters was a fairly basic holoprojector… which meant she could finally make good on a promise she had made some days before.

“Hera, are you busy?”

The rogue hologram materialized on V’Ginn’s couch, looking surprisingly relaxed for someone whose ability to touch things was entirely dependent on her coding. “Nothing I can’t come back to later!”

Rwiari laughed. “So Officer Eiffel will have a boring shift for once, without your coms panel malfunctions to hunt down and tease apart.”

“How did you know about that?”

“Oh, _darling_ child…”

V’Ginn could have gone back to his quarters to check on Rwiari throughout the day. He wanted to; that strange possessiveness where she was concerned was still tugging at him, urging him to make sure his mate was safe and secure.

His mate. Who he had taken unwillingly, who had yielded herself unwillingly to their bond. His mate, who he must have terrified with their first encounter, who had had good reason to believe that an attempt to form a mating bond with him would have ended in her destruction.

How could she be willing now? How could she truly want him? He could only assume that his lust for Rwiari had overwhelmed her, along with the rush of the mating bond snapping into place. He could only assume…

Oh, why had he not noticed sooner? Why had he not realized that his irritation with the woman was because her presence forced him to feel things that he had never felt for another person? His research, yes, he admitted to an illogical affection for. But Rwiari… it went beyond illogical, the warm flush he felt in her presence, halfway between anger and… and…

Perhaps they could have been friends. Perhaps they could have been more, if he had recognized the state of his own mind sooner. But now Rwiari’s every action was suspect, tainted by the story Isa had told him, tainted by the thought that Rwiari might have behaved the way she had because his mind had infected hers with this accursed warmth, and not because she…

He could not even bring himself to think the word.

He could not keep her.

Sixteen hours passed in the ebb and flow of regular appointments, of small emergencies, of a large one when a distress call yielded a shuttle full of injured Cardassians. Sixteen hours, broken by meals as regular as he could find time for, broken by silent lulls when he could seclude himself in his lab and pretend to work on his research. Sixteen hours, the standard shift length for a Vulcan.

If only he were anything but. If only he were Terran, or Andorian, or any one of any number of other races where he could have returned to his quarters after an eight hour shift, could have returned to a partner he could be certain had chosen him because she… a partner he could be certain had chosen him.

He could not keep her. That thought, again and again throughout his day. No matter how sweet the past few days had been with her at his side, he could not keep her there.

_What if she will not go?_

No, better to not contemplate such hope. If he let her stay by his side, he would never forgive himself for what he had done to her. He would never forgive himself if she went, either; there was no absolution from the crime he had committed. With time and distance, she would understand what he understood now; that their mating was a rotten, sickly sort of thing, that though it might drive him to her arms every seven years, it would never be free of its shameful beginning, would never thrive the way such bonds should.

When he finally returned to his quarters, Rwiari was asleep in his bed, and oh, how he wanted to shed this cloud of guilt and shame that had followed him all day, how he wanted to fall into that bed at her side. But he could not, not if he wanted to do the logical thing, the right thing. So he stood there, letting her presence calm him just enough to let him regain control over his own mind.

Rwiari shifted and stretched. Her body was glorious, even more so in her sleep, and for a few moments longer V’Ginn allowed himself to revel in it. And then her eyes opened. At first just a slow flutter, her eyelashes soft against her cheek, but that only lasted until he felt the gentle brush of her mind against his. She was fully awake in an instant, her eyes wide, sitting up in bed with the blanket clutched to her chest.

“V’Ginn?” She studied him, a little frown on her face, the soft touch of her mind probing and flinching away, again and again, as if he were a bruise she could not keep herself from poking at. “Something’s wrong.”

He could not look at her and still say what he needed to say, so he turned his head away, still standing at attention just inside his bedroom door. “You were correct.”

“Correct?”

“I did allow my hormones to override my logic where you are concerned.”

“I see.” He felt a twist of pain from Rwiari, and oh, his instinct to protect his mate from all pain took the choice of whether or not to look at her away from him. But all he saw was the fleeting tail-end of an expression that could have been anything, all he felt when he reached for her mind was her thoughts made carefully neutral. “I’ll get dressed and get myself out of your hair, then.”

_No!_ He wanted to scream. Instead he inclined his head in her direction, a ghost of a nod. “That would be for the best.”

He returned to the main room of his quarters, giving her privacy as she shuffled into the dress she had last worn more than three days ago. Rwiari emerged from his bedroom and headed for the door, pausing before it would have opened for her and turning back to look at him.

“Thank you,” she said, a little smile on her face. “That was glorious. If your hormones ever override your logic again, you know where to find me.”

V’Ginn nodded stiffly at this, not trusting his voice. After a moment of waiting for some further response, Rwiari nodded stiffly back and left him.

For good, he hoped.

He did not deserve more than that.


	12. Chapter 12

It took a week before Rwiari was willing to leave her quarters again. Isa worried—Rwiari could feel it—but as captain of the Hephaestus she was too busy to do much more than stop by for the occasional cup of tea, and most of those visits were cut short enough by the call of duty that Isa was lucky if she managed to finish a single cup.

Rwiari had hoped that V’Ginn would come to her. To make certain that she had recovered fully from her bout of plak tow, if nothing else. Instead, he sent a nurse to her quarters to do a wellness visit.

That stung, she had to admit. True, she felt almost fully recovered, but the fact that he had not even been able to face her long enough to do a quick scan and confirm it for himself… oh, that hurt, so much more than the rejection she had felt when he had asked her to leave his room.

She had to get off this ship.

“Isa, darling, I don't want you to get nervous, but some time in the next day or two your security staff are going to come across a series of coded messages that left this ship on a secure channel.” Rwiari had finally left her quarters for this, to come to the bridge and pull her niece aside into the briefing room and warn her of what was on its way. Not that warning was truly necessary, but people tended to get nervous when a shielded Warbird appeared unexpectedly off their port bow.

Isa’s response was remarkably mild, albeit accompanied by a raised eyebrow. “What have you done, Auntie Ri?”

“I called my friends. Aidoann. She’s willing to take me to Betazed.”

“We could have done that for you, you know.” Isa’s expression was concerned now, a tremulous whisper of fear working its way to the surface of her mind.

“I know. But this way… this way you can help throw anyone looking for me off the scent for a bit. I've already had a talk with Hera about that. And also…”

Isa nodded. “You want to get away from him.”

“What I want is for him to want to be with me as much as I want to be with him.” Rwiari sighed. “But he doesn't want me at all, I suspect. Not beyond… not beyond the physical. And that isn't enough for him to want to keep me by his side.”

“He’s Vulcan. Give him time. Emotions happen slow for them.”

“Not true at all, and you've been in enough Vulcan minds to know it, even if you weren't half Vulcan yourself. Emotions happen fast and hard for them, and then they spend the next twenty years denying those emotional reactions exist. Well.” Rwiari pretended to dust an invisible speck of lint off the front of her dress for emphasis. “I haven't got twenty years. I'm not going to wait for him to decide how he does or does not feel about me. I don't have time for that.”

Isa sighed, but did not push the subject. “So. Betazed.”

“Yes.”

“It's still a recovering war zone.”

“I know. That's why I'm going.” Rwiari took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “They need people who weren't there during the occupation. To help stabilize those who survived it,” she added when Isa gave her a confused look.

Isa frowned at that. “You're not much more stable yourself.”

“But I've never used my empathic powers the way they were forced to. It might be enough.”

“Ri…”

“Don't ask me to stay, darling girl. I can't do it.”

“I just… your status is still tenuous.”

“Which is why I've contacted Lwaxana Troi. She's got enough pull with the Federation to make sure they understand that my presence on Betazed is more important than any half-baked accusations they might still try to throw at me.” In truth, it had been Lwaxana who had reached out to her, shortly after news of Rwiari’s pardon had come through, but Rwiari had not had time to consider the ambassador’s request before she had been sent off on that mission with V’Ginn. And it hadn't seemed fair to choose Betazed during those weeks when she had barely been holding herself together.

But now, she had had time to consider, and an excellent reason to choose to leave.

And she would.

No matter how much she wanted to stay.

“If you're certain this is what you want to do…”

“I'm certain.”

It had been a week. It had been a week, and it was still no easier. V’Ginn could not bear this distance from Rwiari… but how could he close it? How could he ever go to her again, knowing what he knew now? Knowing that she must have been terrified to be trapped aboard a shuttle with a Vulcan undergoing pon farr after what had happened to her cousin. Knowing that the only reason she had taken the actions she had once they had returned to the Hephaestus was because his pon farr had infected her mind, knowing that her actions aboard the shuttle had most likely had the same root cause.

He had been a fool to think it would last.

“Isa to Dr. V’Ginn.” The captain’s voice interrupted his train of thought. Though given the content of those thoughts, it was almost a relief.

“Yes, Captain?” V’Ginn heard his own voice, snappish and irritable, and winced.

“Are you free?”

“At present moment.”

“I'm on my way to the medbay. We need to talk.”

“Very well.”

A few minutes later, Isa strode into the medbay, her every move tense with barely-leashed anger. “V’Ginn. Your lab,” she said, not waiting for him to respond before heading towards the door at the back of the medbay.

“Ri’s leaving,” she said once they were in his lab, a closed door between them and the medbay.

V’Ginn felt as if a great pit had opened in his chest. “I see,” he managed to say, though he could not feel his lips form the words.

Isa stared at him, obviously aghast. “That’s really all you're going to say? I knew you were a cold bastard, but don't you care even a little bit about her?”

“She is her own person. She is free to go wherever she wishes.”

“Bullshit. She’s your mate, V’Ginn. I may not have one of my own, but I've seen how other Vulcans get around their mates. And I've seen what happens to them when they are separated too long.”

“Perhaps in cases where both partners chose the mating. But as neither Miss Ibreten nor I chose our mating freely…” The words were coming more easily now, even if he suspected what he was saying was mostly nonsense, at least on his part. He had come to the realization over this past week without her that if his pon farr had started while he had been aboard the Hephaestus and not while trapped aboard a crashed shuttle, he would have gone to Rwiari and begged her to relieve his distress.

He was certain that she would have refused him, but he would have begged her nonetheless.

“I want to punch you right now,” Isa said, almost conversationally. “I'm your captain, so I won't, but damn do I want to.”

V’Ginn swallowed hard. “This is the only way.”

Isa froze, and he threw his inner walls into place. Perhaps they would not be enough to keep her out, but if they were not, no doubt she would also be subtle enough to slip into his mind without noticing. Her eyes narrowed as she stared at him, and a low shiver of terror went through him, accompanied by a sense of being pressed inward from all sides.

“You really believe that, don't you.” Isa voice was cold with fury, but there was a faintly wondering tone to it, all the same. “And you won't be able accept any other reality as long as that idea is stuck in your head. I could tell you, Ri could tell you, hell, the universe itself could manifest in physical form in front of you and tell you that things could be different, and you still would not be able to change what you believe.” She blinked, and the pressure released, and V’Ginn could breathe once more.

“She will never be free of me.” His voice was strangely hoarse all of a sudden, and foreign to his ears. “I can at least give her this freedom, if nothing else. The freedom to leave.”

“She’s going to Betazed.”

That empty pit in his middle deepened. He had come across more than a few reports of the current state of affairs on that planet when he had been researching potential solutions to Rwiari’s illness. “She intends to help with… with the recovery?”

“Yes.” That word, in the tone Isa said it, gave him all the information he needed. Rwiari intended to go to Betazed and use her mental abilities to help the Betazoids who had had their minds shattered by the strain put on them by the Dominion occupation. A dangerous task at the best of times.

But for someone like Rwiari, someone who had spent more than a decade with a device implanted in her mind that had kept her from being fully in control over her own actions, someone who had only recently started recovering from a bout of plak tow, it could be deadly.

“She cannot.” The words wrenched themselves from his throat, accompanied by a noise that sounded almost like a sob. “Captain, you must stop her.”

Isa shook her head. “No. I know what’s driving her to it. I will not call her back from it.”

“Please.” His voice broke on the word, the hole in his middle dug deeper, leaving him hollowed-out and empty. “Please, captain. You cannot want this for her.”

“It’s my planet too, V’Ginn.” Isa’s voice broke as well, and her eyes gleamed with a sudden sheen of tears. “It was the first place I was ever truly happy, and if I did not have duties of my own to see to, if I did not have this ship to captain, I would follow her in a heartbeat.” She pulled her emotions back into control and took a deep breath. “So I will not keep her from it, if that is what she truly wants to do.”

V’Ginn followed his captain’s example, letting the methods he had learned so long ago to help control his emotions bleed the urgency of the panic he was feeling away. “Why are you here, then?” he asked once he had control of himself once more.

“Because I don't know if she’s going because she wants to be there, or if she is going because she wants to get away from you.”

Those words lingered in V’Ginn’s head for the rest of his shift, lingered as he returned to his quarters.His rooms were still full of memories of those few glorious days he had spent with Rwiari before reality had made itself known. Today, with his captain’s words echoing in his head, he was only able to stay there a bare minute after coming off of shift. The weight of those memories became too much almost immediately and he left again, roaming the halls, searching for something to soothe his overactive mind.

He noticed he was making his way towards the quarters of the relatively few civilians on the ship, and turned abruptly, forcing himself into a turbolift and making for the holodecks instead. And there, instead of some more logical option…

“Computer, call up V’Ginn program theta,” he commanded. The program initialized, the form he had made over into Rwiari materializing in front of him.

She smiled and reached for him, and all he could do was fold her in his arms, bury his face against her neck, and break into deep, body-wracking sobs that he hadn't even realized he had been holding in.

He did not know what he was going to do without her.

But he could not hold her back from what must be the true calling of her heart. No doubt she would have chosen this sooner, had it not been for his interference with her mind. And it was good, that Rwiari was choosing this. Perhaps it was a sign that he had not irrevocably damaged her, that she could choose what path she wished to take in her life without the way he had infected her mind limiting her ability to choose.

She would go.

And then he would be able to hate himself in peace.


	13. Chapter 13

Rwiari packed what few possessions she owned over the next few days. The month and a bit since she had received her pardon had not been quite long enough to do much more than to design and replicate a wardrobe that was just barely sufficient for day to day wear, not that it had been much of a priority.

Aside from that ridiculous ballgown she had spent half an hour designing so that she could distract V’Ginn from the state she had been in back then, her body and mind wracked by the half-formed bond she had been keeping from him. That dress had definitely been a priority.

And that dress went back in the replicator, along with everything else that had unnecessary decoration, to be replaced by a series of practical, simply cut dresses, the only obvious difference their color. She might have the ability to be frivolous here, aboard one of the most powerful ships in the Federation’s fleet, but she would be better served on Betazed by plain, sturdy clothing, easy to clean in a vibe-shower along with the rest of her.

Easier to pack, too.

“Here,” Isa said, handing over a holocube. She had been coming to Rwiari’s quarters—just to make sure that Rwiari had everything she needed, of course—at least twice a day since Rwiari had announced her intention to leave. “I thought you might want this back.”

Rwiari took it and took a good look at it—and almost dropped it. “I thought Lieutenant Ch’Laart had had this destroyed,” she said, wrapping her fingers around it tightly.

“The data solid? Yes. But that…” Isa shrugged. “I figured there wasn't much it could hide on that, and if it was important enough to you that you were keeping it close even in prison…”

“Yes. It’s… let me show you.” Rwiari turned her attention to the holocube, pressing her fingernails into a pair of little grooves that would have looked like accidental scratches to anyone who didn't know what they were looking for. The holocube activated, and a glowing image emerged from the top.

“It’s me,” Isa said quietly. Her eyes were suddenly bright with tears.

“Yes.”

“I'm going to miss you, Auntie Ri.” The tears started falling, and Rwiari tucked the cube into a pocket on her dress and reached for for her niece, pulling Isa into a tight hug. “You stay safe, all right?” Isa muttered against Rwairi’s shoulder, her voice muffled by the fabric. “Don't you dare go dying on me. Not now that I've found you again.”

“I promise.” The words rang hollow. She could not promise anything of the sort, and she knew it.

She had been drifting since she had been released from the ship’s brig, since she had been released from the device that had held her in thrall for the better part of a decade. She had needed a purpose, and now she had found one.

And she intended to commit to it fully, no matter what that meant for her safety. After all, her death was the only way V’Ginn would be free of her. So while she would not seek death out purposefully… well. If her death should happen to be the result of the path before her, so be it.

“Bridge to Isa. We’re receiving a hail from the Romulan Warbird Nei’rrh. They’ll be rendezvousing with us within the next fifteen minutes, and Captain Aidoann requests permission to send over a shuttle.”

“Tell her permission granted. Docking bay 5. And I'll be there to meet it.”

“Isa, darling, you don't need to…”

“I want to.” She tapped her com badge again. “Isa to Lieutenant Minkowski. You're in charge of the bridge until I've handed Ri off, all right?”

“Understood, Captain,” came a response in the navigation officer’s steady voice.

“I can carry my own bag, you know.”

Isa frowned, and appeared to notice the single black duffel bag sitting on the bed for the first time. “That's all you have? I thought you’d had a chance to replicate more than that by now.”

“Most of it went back. I won't need a ball gown on Betazed, dear.”

“I suppose not.” Isa took two loping strides over to the bed and scooped up the duffel, slinging it over her shoulder. “Let me carry it anyway. It'll keep me from doing something I'll regret later.”

“What’s that?” They headed out the door of Rwiari’s quarters and down the corridor, heading towards the docking bays.

“V’Ginn hasn't come to say goodbye to you, has he?”

Isa answering Rwiari’s question with a question of her own threw Rwiari off balance enough to answer truthfully. “No.”

“Well, there you go. You're keeping me from kicking my CMO’s ass and forcing him to give you at least that much courtesy.”

“I wouldn't want it if it’s forced.”

“You're a better woman than I am.”

“No, just an older one.” Rwiari sighed. “Old enough to know there are some people who will never change their ways. Not if they don't want to. And it's useless to try to change their ways for them.”

Isa went silent for the rest of the walk to the shuttle bay, though Rwiari could tell that her niece was still angry. But telling Isa the truth of the situation, any truth of the situation, would only make her angrier.

After all, what could Rwiari say? “I'm glad he didn't come because now I don't have to pretend to not be desperately in love with the man?” “Of course I want to see him again, more than anything, but why should he come to me when I was too much of a coward to go to him?”

Neither would do, so instead, Rwiari said nothing.

They entered the docking bay to chaos. Rwiari dodged out of the way as someone in a gold uniform came flying through the air.

Isa dropped Rwiari’s duffel bag, that simmering anger she had been just barely keeping in check coming out as a shout. “ENOUGH!” A telepathic burst followed the word, making Rwiari wince, even through her walls; to someone not capable of or accustomed to shielding their mind from such things, it would have—and had, Rwiari noticed, as bodies dropped to the floor—hit with an almost physical force. She threw a blanket of calm across the minds in the room in the wake of Isa’s telepathic hit, and got a grateful look from her niece.

“Someone going to tell me what happened here? Officer Fisjer?”

Officer Fisjer had the tall form of Hallad Bengod in a headlock and was half sitting on him. “This… this _colonizer_—”

“Leave your personal feelings about Cardassians out of this, Fisjer. What. Happened.”

As Fisjer started in on his story of Hallad refusing to submit to a search before being allowed off the shuttle, Rwiari crossed the room to Aidoann’s side. She was sitting in the middle of a ring of efficiently downed security officers and was rubbing her forehead.

“You all right there, _a'rhea_?”

Aidoann shot a glare at Rwiari for the affectionate term, and then seemed to realize it could have been worse. “Your captain is… strong.”

“What happened?” Rwiari turned her attention to the first of the downed security officers, sending a small mental probe out to assure herself that the woman was not badly injured.

“Hallad’s not used to feeling like the rest of us do in his presence.”

“Oh.” The officer Rwiari had just examined would have a headache, but she’d recover, so Rwiari moved on to the second officer.

“It arouses him,” Aidoann said drily.

“Yes, I'm aware. He does realize Fisjer is married, doesn't he?” Rwiari moved on to the third officer. Good. Nothing too bad so far, either from Aidoann’s _llaekh-ae'rl_ or from Isa’s mental blast.

“That does not always mean monogamy.”

“And in Fisjer’s case it doesn’t, but that doesn't mean he’d be interested in a Cardassian. Not when he spent so much of his life killing them.” Rwiari slid into the mind of the fourth officer and reeled backwards. _~Isa, darling, you might want to get someone from the medbay up here. Now.~_

Isa stopped berating Fisjer immediately, her hand going to her com badge. “Isa to medbay. Medical emergency in docking bay 5.”

Isa’s words hit V’Ginn like a physical blow, knocking the breath from his lungs. It was only force of habit that had him grabbing the emergency medical kit on his way out of the medbay, that had him summoning a nurse to accompany him with a flick of his hand. The rest of his mind was churning through the possibilities.

Rwiari was in the docking bay. He could feel here there, the same way he had been able to pinpoint her position on the ship since she had become his mate. He reached for her without thinking as he ran down the corridor, and encountered only a wall, and a jolt of pain, and the impression of her mind busy at some task.

He ran faster.

He got to the docking bay to find Rwiari and Isa on the ground next to a security officer, both concentrating intensely. Rwiari looked up at him with a grateful smile when he approached.

“I think it’s an aneurysm,” she said, though her tone was distracted. She was obviously having some mental conversation with Isa as well. “Isa’s holding things in place for now.”

V’Ginn released the panic that had brought him here and opened up the emergency medkit, pulling out a tricorder and checking the security officer over. “Yes. Here. Hold this.” He handed the tricorder to Rwiari; he had left the nurse behind in his haste to get to the docking bay, and wanted accurate readings while he worked. A few minutes later the nurse arrived and seamlessly took over from Rwiari; a few minutes more, and he was able to tell Isa to release her hold on the security officer’s mind.

The officer woke, groggy and distressed, in short order, and V’Ginn ordered bed rest for the next day, getting to his feet with the intention of escorting the officer to medbay himself. But instead his nurse took over, wrapping her arm around the security officer’s waist and escorting them from the docking bay.

V’Ginn wondered why, until he looked around and realized that everyone else seemed to have melted away, hovering at the opposite end of the docking bay and pretending to have a conversation, or leaving the bay entirely. Everyone except for Rwiari, who was still standing awkwardly by the door to the shuttle.

She gave him a slightly appalled look, obviously realizing the same thing he had; that the news of their mating had spread throughout the ship, along with the news that they had been avoiding each other since then, and now everyone was waiting to see what would happen now that they were in proximity once more.

“So,” she said, forcing a smile on to her face.

“So,” responded V’Ginn. “You are leaving.”

“Yes.” Rwiari looked around, spotting a duffle bag on the ground and scooping it up. “Come help me stow this?”

A terrible idea. He nodded his agreement.

“Come on, then.” She lead him aboard the shuttle, past the small bridge of the vehicle, where those two friends of hers, that over-large Cardassian and that stern Romulan were sitting, pretending to ignore Rwiari and V’Ginn as they passed through, heading towards a small room at the back of the shuttle that was cargo space and barracks all in one. Rwiari came to a halt just inside and shut the door between the bridge and the section of the shuttle they had just entered. They were alone.

V’Ginn silently took the duffle bag from her grasp, crossing the room and tossing it onto one of the bunks, and then stood there, his every nerve screaming with awareness of how close Rwiari was, and how far. Oh, how he wanted her. Even after what he had done, even as wanting her made him hate himself more.

He heard her footsteps as she approached, and a hesitant hand brushed his arm and then withdrew.

“V’Ginn…” She sighed. “Thank you.”

“You are welcome.”

“Listen, I know it's a lot to ask, but…” there was a hesitance to Rwiari’s voice, and he could almost feel her looking for the right words. She let out a little laugh. “Well, not just that. It's awkward to ask. I was wondering… it's just, I don't think I'll be able to have sex with anyone else, not now that we’re mated, and I'm almost resigned to the long dry spell ahead of me, but it would be easier to bear if, well…”

V’Ginn felt the wall around Rwiari’s mind open, just a little. And there was the memory of that fast, fierce encounter that had cemented their mating, bright and clear at the forefront of her mind.

He turned to look at her, and she had a hopeful expression on her face. “You want that here? _Now_?”

She bit her lower lip and nodded. “Please?”

He looked at her, just a little bit incredulous. He had rejected her. He had shoved her away. And she still wanted sex from him? “Insatiable woman,” he heard himself mutter as he leaned in close to her.

“I'm a Betazoid mid-phase. We’re made this way,” she whispered up at him. “It doesn't mean anything. Just that you're a handy body for me to let off some steam with.”

V’Ginn let out a disbelieving huff… and then gave in to the urge he had been feeling since he had seen her kneeling on the docking bay floor, and grabbed her, pulling her hard against his body and burying his face against her neck. She let out a little whimper as he pressed a kiss there and she seemed to melt in his arms, her body molding itself to the contours of his. “Just sex,” he murmured against her neck.

“Yes,” she gasped as he bit down where he’d been kissing. “Let’s deal with those pesky hormones that interfere with your logic while we've got a chance.”

This had nothing to do with hormones, but that was something he would never admit to Rwiari. He swung her around and down to the surface of the bunk he had set her duffle bag on, flinging the bag to the floor, following it quickly with her dress and his uniform.

He was too desperate for her to be slow, in the end. But he felt the same frantic desperation in her, so while he regretted it, he accepted the inevitability of his haste.

“Thank you,” she said when they were done, when they had retreated to opposite sides of the room to get dressed once more.

He didn't want her to thank him. He wanted her to choose him. To turn back the clock, to have her want him because she wanted _him_, and not because their mating had made it impossible for her to seek this kind of comfort in the arms of anyone else.

He wanted to be selfish and keep her to himself, even knowing that he had damaged her, even knowing that it was wrong.

“I wish you the best,” he said instead, crushing his emotional reaction to her mercilessly, because it had no logical place in his mind. “And please… please make certain to not overextend yourself. I would like you to see a Betazoid doctor to make certain that there has been no lasting harm to your mind.”

“I will.” Her response was steady and immediate… and utterly false, he suspected. No doubt she suspected that any doctors on Betazed, whether Betazoid or not, would be far too busy with other patients to have time for anything that wasn't an emergency.

“Please,” he said again, turning to look at her. “Please,” he said once more, crossing the room to her side, reaching for her. “I would feel… I would be remiss in my duties if I did not make certain that you will be receiving appropriate care.”

She jerked away from his hand and glared up at him. “I said I would. I will. Stop talking to me as if I'm a child.”

“Rwiari…”

“Look, darling, I got what I wanted from you. _Everything_ I wanted from you. So run along. I'm sure Aidoann is ready to get back to her ship, and you're holding things up.”

“Very well.” V’Ginn turned jerkily away from Rwiari, not daring to do so much as reach for her mind, and left the shuttle, ignoring the stares of Aidoann and the Cardassian whose name he couldn't remember, ignoring the stares of his own crew mates as he left the docking bay. No doubt all of them had made the correct assumption about what had kept him aboard that shuttle with Rwiari for so long. No doubt there would be even more whispers than there had been, once she left without him.

But for right now, all he could do was run.


	14. Chapter 14

“Arhi. You are still here?”

Rwiari blinked and turned her attention to Aidoann. “Sorry. You were saying something?”

Aidoann tilted her head to one side, studying Rwiari intently. “Nothing of import.”

“Oh. Good.” Rwiari glanced down at the datapad in her lap, which contained a book she hadn't really been reading, and then sighed and shut it off.

“I was simply wondering if you planned to tell Hallad that you have a mate now.”

Rwiari dropped the data pad to the deck with a clatter and looked to Aidoann with wide eyes. “You can tell?”

“Only because I went looking for it. I have never known you to refuse Hallad’s offers of recreational sex.”

And Rwiari had. Oh, she had tried to take him up on it at first. Her first day aboard the Nei’rrh, she had joined Hallad in his quarters, had let him touch her, had let him kiss her. But her body had gone stiff and unyielding in his arms, her mind had revolted against the thought of going further than that, and he had brought a halt to it himself.

“You're not in any sort of a state for this, are you, darling?” he had said.

It had been difficult to admit he was right, but she hadn't had any choice but to admit it.

“I didn't realize how much it would affect me,” was all she said to Aidoann now.

“Hm. That Vulcan you made a mess in my shuttle with?”

“Yes.” There was no use denying either the person or the mess the two of them had left behind, though she had done her best to clean it up once V’Ginn had left.

“And yet you parted on bad terms.”

“Yes.” Another thing it would have been useless to deny, at least to Aidoann.

“Why?” Aidoann asked bluntly.

Rwiari swallowed, hard, trying to prevent the tears that were threatening from bearing down on her. “He didn't want me.” She felt her face crumple, and the tears came anyway. “Oh, I'm sorry. I know it bothers you when I cry.”

Aidoann simply offered her a handkerchief, and Rwiari took it and dabbed at her face.

“You should get Hallad in here,” Rwiari said with a little watery laugh once she had recovered a bit of her composure. “He’s always been much better at the emotional side of things.”

“He does not understand what it is to have a mate.”

Rwiari looked up, startled. There, just a hint of wistfulness in her normally staid friend’s voice. “I thought that was something that Romulans left behind with the teachings of Surak.”

Aidoann inclined her head slightly in Rwiari’s direction. “For those of us who have embraced the mental disciplines in the years since Ambassador Spock came to offer them, it has become something of a necessity.”

Rwiari laughed at that. Aidoann had already been halfway a Vulcan before Spock had come to Romulus, offering the teachings of Surak. Now, there was little aside from morphological differences and a certain wildness to her mind that separated her from her distant cousins. Aidoann let Rwiari in when Rwiari reached for her mind, and there it was, a warm, soft glow at the core of her, an attachment to another person, strong and central to her being. “I didn't know. How did I never notice?”

A small smile crept its way on to Aidoann’s face. “Even as an outcast, it is not politic to be too public with such things. Especially when she is not Romulan.”

“She’s not? Then what…?”

Aidoann raised an eyebrow significantly.

“A Vulcan?”

“Indeed.”

“I see.” Rwiari sat silently for a moment, and Aidoann let her. “Do you love her?”

Aidoann blushed, a reaction so unusual for her that Rwiari could not help but stare. “I… I esteem her. Greatly. Her mind is…” Aidoann trailed off, sounding wistful once again.

“Does she love you?”

“I do not know. She… she does not seek me out. Not unless it is time for… well. I am certain that is a circumstance you have resigned yourself to.”

“Yes.” Rwiari found herself laughing again, laughing until her cheeks hurt and tears were streaming down her face. “Oh, what a pair of foolish women we are, waiting for Vulcans to decide they love us back,” she said, and that got a bark of unexpected laughter out of Aidoann.

“Perhaps some day she will come to me when she is not being driven to my arms by the heat of the pon farr,” Aidoann said with a shrug. “But until then, I will keep returning to her when I can.”

“You're much braver than I am.” Rwiari sighed and relaxed backwards in her chair, a remarkable feat given how uncomfortable most of the furniture aboard Aidoann’s Warbird was. “I don't think I can face him again. And not just because he doesn't want me, but…” She swallowed, hard, fighting off tears once more. “I lashed out at him. I was angry when we parted ways, and I was cruel about it. So I'm not sure if he will even want to see me again.”

“He will want to see you,” Aidoann said cryptically as she got to her feet. “Now, if you will pardon me, it is time to go put the fear of me into my crew.”

Rwiari stood as well, and caught up with Aidoann before she could get too far. “Thank you,” she said, pulling Aidoann into a hug that Rwiari could feel the other woman only just barely tolerating. “I've been feeling quite lonely,” she added as she drew back from the hug and smiled up at Aidoann.

In spite of her obvious irritation with the physical contact, Aidoann smiled back down at Rwiari. “In this, you are not alone.” She shrugged Rwiari’s arms the rest of the way off of her. “Now go nestle up on Hallad’s heated rock with him and get all of this touching out of your system.”

Rwiari let out a little snort of laughter. “I'm going to tell him you said that. It sounds like he’s a pet lizard in a terrarium when you put it that way.”

“Is he not?”

Rwiari laughed harder and followed her friend from the room.

“So. You want to talk about it?”

V’Ginn looked up from the 3D chess board, startled. “Talk about what?”

This got a snort of laughter and an eye-roll from Doug. “About whatever it is that’s got you so distracted that you've let me put you in check twice this game.”

V’Ginn glanced down at the board, appalled. Doug had put him in check again. “You are improving.”

“Bullshit.” Doug frowned. “If nothing’s wrong, all I can assume is that you've gotten so bored of my company that you're trying to lose on purpose to get me out of here faster. And I really hope that isn't it, because you're still the only friend I've got on this ship who isn't a hologram.”

“It is not that.” Doug coming to V’Ginn’s quarters to play 3D chess with him—to lose cheerfully at 3D chess to him—had been a bright spot of routine and normalcy in the days since Rwiari had left the Hephaestus. “I…” V’Ginn didn't know what to say, so instead he reached for the board, planning his next move.

“You want to talk about Ri?”

V’Ginn started, knocking his hand against the board and sending several pieces flying.

“Can't tell if that’s a no or a yes,” Doug said, leaning over to scoop a pawn off the floor.

“Why would I want to talk about Rwiari?”

Doug returned the pawn to the board and shrugged. “I just figure I've got a little more experience in navigating the whole ex-wife situation than you do, and thought I'd offer up what advice I could.”

“She is not my ex-wife.”

“Ex-mate, then.”

“She is not my ex-anything!” V’Ginn snarled, and then wondered why he was feeling so defensive. Doug could not possibly understand. Terrans did not bond with mates in the same way Vulcans did. “She is my mate. She will be until one or the other of us dies.”

Doug raised an eyebrow. “Okaaaay. But she’s not on this ship any more. Feels like that should make her your ex-something.”

V’Ginn replaced the two chess pieces that had fallen on the table and studied the board once more. “I am not certain you would be able to understand.”

Doug reached up and nudged the knight a square over. “Try me.” V’Ginn raised an eyebrow and nudged the knight back, and Doug threw his hands in the air, a smile on his face, as if to say “Okay, you caught me.”

“It is…” V’Ginn kept his eyes on the board as he searched for the right words. “In a mating, two minds become one, you understand?”

“Given that you're not talking about literally exchanging grey matter? No, not really. You going to make your move?”

V’Ginn moved a bishop haphazardly, taking out the piece that had his king in check. “It is a bond that will not wither, will not break. Not until one of us dies.”

Doug took out the bishop with a queen, putting V’Ginn back into check. “That doesn't seem fair. People change a lot over their lives. Sometimes they grow apart.” He sounded a bit sad, most likely remembering the family he had lost the chance to be a part of, the result of his own actions. But all of a sudden V’Ginn wanted to know for sure.

“Is that what happened for you? You grew apart from your wife?”

Doug laughed. “Naw, man, I forcibly threw myself away from my wife. Because I was young and an idiot and didn't think to talk to her about what was going wrong in my life instead of flinging myself to the bottom of a bottle of the nastiest moonshine ever brewed on a colony moon. And then another, and another.” He sighed. “Thank goodness Starfleet hauled me back in and assigned me to the Tiamat. I'm not sure I would have survived without that. Without you and Minkowski on my ass about alcohol, that is.”

“Was she?”

“Yeah. You stalling on your move again?”

“Perhaps a little.” Staring at the board in appalled horror, more like. Doug was only a few moves away from check-mating him. “You have not exchanged more than a few words with her since coming aboard the Hephaestus. Have you been avoiding her?”

“Yes.”

“Why?” That move looked safe. V’Ginn took it.

“Because she’s a Klingon raised by a nice Jewish couple, and her idea of a good time is asking me a thousand questions I can't answer and then kicking my ass.” Doug’s next move was decisive. He must have seen the end coming as well.

V’Ginn spotted his next move. An illogical one, but human brains so rarely worked logically, and if he could just get Doug to take the bait… “And so you come to bother me instead.”

Doug shot V’Ginn a worried look, and V’Ginn quirked an eyebrow upwards, which seemed to calm him. “It’s not that. She just spends a lot of her spare time with the captain. It used to be the Trials of Heracles program, but since Hera, well… became what she is now, she's been coming up with new challenges for the two of them. So the Lieutenant doesn't have time for an old acquaintance.” Doug cleared his throat, frowning at the board. “Was that even a legal move?”

“Yes.”

“Huh. Well, I guess I’d better… nope, not that.”

“Take your time.”

“So anyway, the latest rumor is that Rwiari fucked you into a stupor and left you a broken husk of a man,” Doug said in a cheerful, half-distracted tone as he studied the board.

V’Ginn made an incoherent sound of protest, and Doug looked up.

“Well, you aren't your usual cheery self.”

“I am never cheery.”

“So imagine how cranky you've been lately to make everyone think that.” Doug picked up one of his remaining pawns and made a cautious foray into V’Ginn’s territory with it.

“Surely I have not been so bad as all of that.” V’Ginn made his next move decisively. Doug had fallen for his trap.

“Worse. Stukov was saying in the third shift briefing the other day that he wanted reassignment.”

V’Ginn winced. He and Stukov had worked together without clashing since V’Ginn had been assigned to the Hephaestus. “I see your point.”

“Mm.” Doug was studying the board with a frown again. “What did happen?”

“Do you plan to tell the rest of the crew?”

“Only if it’s something really embarrassing.” Doug seemed to feel V’Ginn’s glare at that and glanced up, holding his hand up defensively. “I'm joking.”

“A bad joke.” V’Ginn hesitated for a moment. Even if Doug did spread rumors, would not the truth be better than the outlandish lies that were currently going around? “What do you know about the teachings of Surak?”

Doug shrugged. “Eschew emotion, blah blah, embrace nonviolence, blah-de-blah. Not much, really. Didn't pay as much attention in Vulcan history as I should have.”

“Do you know why we must control our mental powers so strictly?”

Doug shrugged. “It's not polite to peek into other people’s minds?”

“Worse than that. If we are not careful when entering the mind of another, we can cause great harm. We can plant thoughts that do not belong to the other person. We can change them, fundamentally and intrinsically.”

Doug had started studying V’Ginn instead of the board between them. “You think you changed Ri,” he said bluntly.

“I know I changed her.”

“Well, yeah, sure. You formed a mating bond with her or whatever.”

V'Ginn shook his head sharply. “No. I…” His jaw clenched, and he took a moment to shove his emotions back into an orderly state. “She has always…” No. Those words were wrong. “I have always… she was an irritation, you understand? Always in my mind. If she was not somewhere I could see, I would find myself wondering what trouble she was getting up to elsewhere. Irritation. And also… I do not even have the words. Wanting to watch her get up to trouble. Wanting to…” V’Ginn sighed.

“Affection? Or, well, that sounds an awful lot like when I used to follow Kate around like a lovesick puppy when we were both teenagers who delighted in getting in trouble together.”

Only one of those words stuck with V’Ginn.

Lovesick.

“Oh no,” V’Ginn muttered, folding his arms on the table and lowering his head to them.

“So you're in love with Ri?” Doug asked. “And you're afraid that, what? When you guys formed your mating bond, or whatever it was you were doing in here for two days, you somehow forced her to love you back?”

V’Ginn let out a little groan of affirmation, somewhat annoyed that Doug had managed to know his mind better than he himself had known it.

“Yeah, that’s nonsense,” Doug said decisively.

“And how would you know?”

“Did you ever notice the way Ri looks at you?”

V’Ginn had only ever noticed the over-the-top way she had flirted. “Like she wanted to eat me alive,” he muttered into his sleeve.

“Maybe at first. But not after she’d been here for a couple of weeks, and definitely not after the two of you brought the captain back after she drove off that Q.”

V’Ginn lifted his head from his arms, and met Doug’s direct stare. “How, then?”

“She looks at you like you’re her entire world.”

V’Ginn shut his eyes and dropped his head into his arms once more, remembering Rwiari’s bitter parting words. “Not any more.”

”She did once. Maybe again.” Doug was silent for a long moment, and then V’Ginn heard the click of a chess piece. “Checkmate.”


	15. Chapter 15

_~Darling, I’m so glad you decided to join us!~ _Lwaxana Troi—daughter of the Fifth House, Holder of the Sacred Chalice of Rixx, and Heir to the Holy Rings of Betazed that she was—swept Rwiari into a hug. For all the dignity of her titles, she only stood on ceremony when she had something to gain by it.

_~Ambassador Troi. Thank you for clearing the way for me to come here.~_

_~Oh, hush. And call me Lwaxana.~ _She held Rwiari at arm’s length, studying her. _~Let’s see where you'll fit in best, shall we?~_

Rwiari relaxed the walls around her mind enough for Lwaxana to slip inside, wincing a little. Even at her gentlest, Lwaxana was… forceful.

_~Oh, my dear. A Vulcan? Really? They're such bores. And after what happened with your cousin…~_

_~Like him, I have terrible taste in sexual partners.~_ Rwiari responded drily.

_~And that is my hint to get out of your mind, I take it.~_

Rwiari winced again as Lwaxana withdrew the tendrils of her mind. _~Thank you.~ _

_~Don't thank me. I'm about to put you to work.~_ Thin lines of strain were gathered at the corners of Lwaxana’s eyes and mouth, belying her apparent cheerfulness. No doubt she had been pushing her limits for quite some time now. _~You're a little more crossed in love than I'd like you, but you're stable, and that’s what counts. Maybe more stable than most of us, with that mating bond holding you steady.~_

_~For the first time in my life, I'm the stable one. That’s new.~_ Rwiari sighed. No doubt she would encounter more than a few other Betazoids aware of the worst that had come from the Ibreten lineage. _~Where do you want me?~_

_~Come with me.~ _Lwaxana beckoned her along, and Rwiari followed.

Time to get to work.

And work she did, the next weeks turning into months before she had realized it was happening. She had spent so much time in the minds of other Betazoids that she had become somewhat unmoored from the flow of time in the world outside of the mental one in which she was working.

So many people had shattered themselves while doing what was necessary to drive the Dominion from their world. The ones who had gone up against the Vorta were the worst off; the Jem’Hadar had been easy to overwhelm, once someone had found the key to slipping into their minds, but the Vorta who had been sent to Betazed had had mental powers of their own.

Some had been so far shattered that they would never recover, and most of those who did would never regain their previous strength. So many of the best and brightest Betazoid minds, lost for good. Perhaps their children might some day be almost what they had once been, but right now, as a species, the Betazoid were no longer whole.

“You look awful, darling.” Lwaxana emerged from the therapy room across from Rwiari’s at the same time she exited the one she had been using. It was strange, still, hearing the ambassador’s voice out loud, but by the end of a day spent diving into the minds of shattered Betazoid empaths and trying to help them heal, telepathy wound up being a bit of a stretch.

“A little tired, is all. And something about this work turns my stomach some days.” And she was missing V’Ginn, for all that she had no doubt he wasn't missing her at all. Some days, she longed for the ability to go home from this work she was doing and fall into bed with him, just to have him sleeping at her side.

“Being pregnant will do that to you.”

Rwiari came to an abrupt halt in the hallway. “Being what?”

Lwaxana returned to her side. “You weren't aware? I thought it was deliberate.”

“I… do you think any of the doctors are free?”

Lwaxana grinned, a little wickedly. “If not, they will be.”

“Don't you dare interrupt someone doing something important!”

“I would never. And it looks like Dr. Egolo has just come in for night shift. Come along!”

It took less than fifteen minutes for Lwaxana to wrangle Dr. Egolo away from her start-of-shift reports, and another five for confirmation. “Looks like you’re about three months along, though there are some abnormalities in their development…”

“The father is Vulcan,” Rwiari said, feeling faint.

“That would do it.” The doctor shrugged and set aside her tricorder. “I would suggest spending fewer hours here for the next two months, and…” she checked a readout on a nearby screen. “Given your family history of mental powers activating in utero, I’d say we need to ban you from working here starting at about the five month mark. If your children have the same disorder, that's about when they'll start reaching out to the minds around them, and you won't be able to protect them from encountering something that could hurt them if you're in someone else’s mind.”

Rwiari placed her hand protectively over her stomach at those words… and then the rest of what the doctor had said registered. “Wait, children? As in multiple?”

“Not unusual for a Betazoid who falls pregnant during the phase. Twins.”

“I see.” Rwiari rubbed her hand over her stomach, considering.

She had told herself, time and again, that the Ibreten family line would die out with her. Oh, there were a few distant cousins who still lived, but they were not Ibretens, and they had not inherited the volatility that made the Ibretens what they were. And there was Isa, but the Vulcan side of her had had a tempering effect, and she had not fallen prey to any of the mental ailments that plagued the Ibreten line.

Which could mean hope for these children as well.

“You do want to continue the pregnancy, don't you?” Dr. Egolo asked pointedly.

“Yes,” Rwiari answered without thinking. “Oh, yes.”

“Right. Then I'll expect you back here for frequent checkups. Vulcan is… an unusual second parent for a hybrid Betazoid child. I'm not sure we even have records of how such pregnancies advance.”

“I'll send a message to an acquaintance of mine. The mother was the Vulcan half of the pair in that case, and they didn't realize the father’s ancestry until the child was born, but it should give you some idea of how things progressed.”

“I would appreciate that.”

Selek was more than happy to send along the records of his sister’s pregnancy. “But you are stable? There is no danger?” There was just a hint of worry in his tone of voice.

“I'm not going to go the way Nisa did,” Rwiari reassured him. “The mating bond was—is—stable.”

“But your mate is not with you.”

“Well, he's the chief medical officer on a starship, Selek. He doesn't have enough leave to spend months at a time planet-side unless he’s assigned there.” Just enough obfuscation to keep Selek from working out the true state of Rwiari’s relationship—or current lack of it—with V’Ginn. And Selek rarely spoke with Isa about more than the most mundane of updates on the other members of her extended Vulcan family.

“Surely Isa could give him more leave. He should be there.”

Or perhaps not. “Oh, no. It’s fine. I'll be rejoining the Hephaestus in another month or two.” She intended no such thing, but the one advantage of communicating over such a distance was that Selek had no way to tell when she was being less than honest with him.

“You will let me know how it continues?”

Rwiari smiled. “Of course. I'm sure I'll be pestering you for tips on how to cope with them. As far as I know, you're the only person who has parented a Betazoid-Vulcan hybrid from birth.”

“And an excellent job I was doing at that before you came along.” Selek’s voice was even more dry than usual as he delivered that little bit of self-deprecating humor.

“You did as well as you could under the circumstances. And she turned out all right, didn't she? Captain, at her age.”

Selek couldn't seem to help himself. He smiled. “She is remarkable, our Isa.”

“Yes, she is.”

After a few more minutes spent bragging to one another about their shared niece, the conversation wound to an end… and left Rwiari to do some damage control. Time to make sure that when Selek brought Rwiari’s pregnancy up with his niece, Isa would already be aware of the facts.

And while she was at it…

There was a message waiting on V’Ginn’s computer for him when he woke up. Not unusual; C’Lahhrt often saw to it that he received a security briefing before his next shift, and there were often memos from Isa, or notices from Stukov on a difficult case that had come in while he was off shift.

But this message was not from any of the usual suspects.

“Message from Rwiari Ibreten. Do you wish to play?”

Three months. Three months, and she had not sent him a message in all that time.

Not that he had sent her one. He had started what felt like hundreds of messages by now, started and abandoned and deleted because he didn’t know what to say. And now…

“No, computer. Save message for later. I will listen to it after my shift.”

He regretted that, when he went to the briefing. A little nod from Isa indicated she wanted a minute with him after the briefing, and when he waited for her…

“I understand I ought to be congratulating you.” Her tone of voice was cautious, as if not sure how he would react.

“For?”

Isa frowned. “Ri said she sent you a message, too.”

“Ah. I did not have time to listen to it this morning.”

“Well, pull it up now.”

“Captain…”

“I’ll step out of the room. But I think you should listen to it sooner rather than later.”

“Very well.”

Isa left, and V’Ginn went to the console set in the wall. “Computer, play message from Rwiari Ibreten.”

The screen lit up, and there she was. She looked tired, so tired, and too thin. No doubt she had not been eating enough. Telepaths rarely remembered that their calorie consumption should go up when they were using their mental powers to excess, and he suspected that Rwiari had been at work from the moment she had landed on Betazoid, even if not consciously.

And then his mind caught up with what she had been saying.

“…and I don’t know if you’ll want to be a father, but I thought that I ought to let you know, just in case.” She bit her lower lip, a familiar, nervous gesture that left him feeling a great swell of tenderness. “I’ve included a current copy of my medical scans, if you want to take a look. And I’ll be leaving here in a month or two, for somewhere I won’t have to constantly shield myself, just in case they do end up like me. Maybe Vulcan. Isa’s uncle has offered to put me up, if I need a place to stay.”

There was another pause, and a little furrow of a frown appeared between her eyebrows for just a moment. “Stay safe, V’Ginn.”

The message ended, and he replayed it from the beginning, taking in the words he had missed. It was a dry little missive, just the fact of her pregnancy, that she was doing as well as could be expected, and the bit of the message that he had finally paid attention for the first time around.

“I don’t know if you’ll want to be a father,” she had said. The closest thing he had to hope, where she was concerned. She had asked nothing of him, not truly. If he wanted, he could leave her and their children behind, only return to her side in another seven years.

What did she want?

He played the message again, paused it, reached up to touch the image of his mate. A pointless, foolish gesture. Align the fingers like that, send his mind to hers, and they would be one. And he would know… know what? Whether she cared for him? Whether she loved him in return?

There was a knock on the door to the briefing room, and V’Ginn dropped his hand from the image on the console. “Come in.”

“So. Should I be congratulating you?” Isa crossed the room to his side and looked at Rwiari’s image, frozen on the screen.

“I do not know.” V’Ginn sighed. “She has offered me parenting rights.”

“That’s good.” Isa placed a hand on his shoulder, and he did his best not to flinch. “You’ve got an awful lot of unused leave piled up, you know.”

“Captain?”

“I’m just saying. You could go to her.”

A terrifying thought. “I would not know what to say.” He shrugged Isa’s hand off of his shoulder. “I should get to work, Captain. Dr. Stukov is annoyed enough with my behavior as of late without me coming late for my shift.”

“But less annoyed than he was. He hasn’t threatened to quit for two whole months.”

“Mm.”

“What knocked you back into shape, anyway? I thought I was going to have to have an intervention with the two of you.”

“I lost to Doug at 3D chess.” Twice.

Isa winced. “Ouf. A hell of a wake-up call for you.”

“Yes.” V’Ginn finally tore his gaze away from Rwiari’s image. “Captain,” he said, along with a little nod of acknowledgement as he left.

To his chagrin, Isa did not leave the subject of V’Ginn taking leave alone. “We could get on without you for a couple of weeks. And we’re relatively close to Betazed right now. Better to fetch her now before she ends up taking herself off to Vulcan or wherever she decides she wants to give birth,” and “Look, you haven’t taken proper leave for more than two years, as your captain I could order you to take time off.”

The latter he had responded to with the dry statement that if he took leave, she would have no control over what he did with it, and if he chose to spend the entire two weeks locked up in his quarters she would have to let him stay there, and finally, she relented.

As the weeks ticked onward, he received more messages from Rwiari, mostly updated scans from her doctor. The children—both still of indeterminate gender, at this stage, given their mixed ancestry—were developing as they should, or at least as the doctor expected they ought to be developing.

He did not respond. He did not know how.

Five months, and he had received no update from Rwiari about where she intended to go. Perhaps Isa knew, but he had no doubt she would refuse to tell him unless he promised to take leave and join Rwiari, and he still could not bring himself to do that.

“You look awful.”

V’Ginn froze, one hand still hovering in the air in front of the console he had been working on. It couldn't be…

There was the soft brush of another mind’s amusement against his own, and he knew that it was. He put his hands down on the console to steady himself, not daring to turn. “Rwiari.”

“In the flesh.”

V’Ginn swallowed hard, trying to dislodge the lump in his throat, seeking wildly within his own mind for calm and finding it nowhere. “Why are you here?”

He heard the soft tap of her shoes, and then, out of the corner of his eye, he could see the bright blur of her dress, standing just out of reach. “Your Captain is a little annoyed that you're not following her order to take some time off. She thought I might have better luck. I told her that you'd most likely work even harder to spite me, but…”

V’Ginn shut his eyes. Even a blurry image of her in the corner of his eye was too much to bear. But that only made him realize that she was close enough to smell; the subtle scent of her citrusy perfume teased him, reminding him of what it had been like during those two days before he had ruined his chance of happiness with this woman. “I am certain the captain will appreciate the attempt,” he rasped out.

He heard a little sigh from Rwiari, and the sound of footsteps—not leaving, coming closer. Every muscle in his body tensed, and he clung to the console, knowing that if he let go, he would grab her… and this time, he did not think he would have the strength to let her go.

He felt the warmth of her hand, hovering over his arm for a moment and then withdrawing. She let out another sigh, and he almost imagined that he could feel her breath against his cheek.

“I miss you,” she said finally, breaking the tense silence that had grown between them. “I keep telling myself that one of these days, I'm going to wake up and won't spend my day wondering how you are, where you are, what you're doing, but I still do. Every day.” He heard her swallow hard, as if feeling a lump in her throat. “And I keep hoping that some day I'll turn around and there you'll be. And I don't know if you'll believe me, but the silly thing is…” she let out a little laugh that was more desperate than amused. “The silly thing is, I felt that way before the shuttle.”

“Rwiari…” Her name was barely a sigh on his lips.

“I know you don't want me. I know there isn't much to want. I know I'm too old, and too loud, and too… too everything, especially for a Vulcan. Especially for you. But, on the off chance that it matters, I wanted to say it.” The warmth of herhand hovered over his arm again, and then traveled up, finally coming to a rest against his cheek, cupping it tenderly. “I’m not afraid of doing this alone, so don’t think this is about… well, you know. It’s just that I think I might be in love with you. And I know you're a Vulcan and there’s nothing at all logical about love, but I just figured I ought to say it anyway, in case you…”

Rwiari sighed again and made as if to lift her hand from his cheek, but before she could, V’Ginn was pressing her hand back in place with his own, interlacing his fingers with hers. He felt a small spike of joy from her that she couldn't quite hide, followed by a surge of warmth that enveloped him.

“Please say something,” she whispered. “Please.”

V’Ginn opened his eyes and looked at his mate for the first time in months, taking in the changes of these past months, now that they were here in front of him and not flat images on a screen. There, the curve of her stomach, already large enough to dominate her short frame despite her bulk. There, anxious lines bracketing her mouth. There, dark circles around her eyes, that left him wanting to do what he had done all those months ago and haul his mate off to his quarters to take care of her.

But that would not happen if he gave her nothing. So he took a deep breath and released his tight control over the tangle of emotions in his mind, opening himself entirely to her for the first time.

Rwiari took in a deep, surprised breath as she met his eyes, and then her own eyes filled with tears and she flung herself against his chest, clinging to him, the walls around her own mind opening to embrace his mind within them. He was too startled to do anything but crush her to him in return, pressing kisses to her hair, her forehead, to every bit of her that he could reach, letting her feel the way he loved her and taking in her love in return.

“I hope you realize that I am not letting you go again,” he murmured down at her.

Rwiari pulled back just enough to smile up at him, everything about her glowing with joy despite the tears that still clung to her lashes. “I'm counting on it.”

“Good.” He glared at the console he'd been working on. “Computer, save this simulation. It is time for me to take some time off.”

Rwiari laughed at that and let him sweep her down the hall to his quarters.

And then, for a little while, they did their best to forget the rest of the universe.

Hours later, they were curled up together on the bed in V’Ginn’s quarters together, half asleep—at least in Rwiari’s case—and content.

“What brought you back?” he asked, his fingers rubbing a little circle on her lower back, seeking out a knot he knew was there without needing to ask her. “Did Isa keep bothering you the way she was bothering me?”

“Sending me a message every couple of days with ‘You can handle V’Ginn much better than I can, please, I need you Auntie,’ or ‘I know V’Ginn’s an ass and I can’t seem to convince him to go to you, but I know he wants to?’ Oh, yes. But that wasn’t what brought me back.”

“What was, then?” He slowed the circles of his hand and let it come to a rest against her hip.

“Officer Eiffel,” came her amused response.

V’Ginn snorted. “Officer Eiffel?”

“Mm.” Rwiari set her hand on top of his, her fingers caressing him gently and making it very difficult to concentrate as Rwiari continued talking. “He sent me a letter. Talking about how every time one of my messages for you arrived on one of the days you two had an evening of 3D chess scheduled, you would spend half the time he was in your quarters showing him details of scans and rambling on about how you hoped that my doctor was taking proper care of me, and then you would spend the rest of the evening almost losing to him.”

“And that was enough to convince you to come back? After what I did…”

“As if I didn’t try to hurt you too.” Rwiari scooped his hand up off her hip and held it in both of hers, pressing a kiss to the palm before stroking his fingers gently. V’Ginn let out a moan and shut his eyes. “Here,” she said, lifting his hand to the side of her face, fitting his fingers to the correct nerve endings. “Be sure. I’m here because I want to be, V’Ginn.”

He met her gaze, let his mind brush against her surface thoughts for a moment, making certain that this was what she wanted. And then her fingers were on his face as well, and with a rush he was joined with her, her mind melding with his, her every wall down for the first time since he had met her.

They were two.

And then they were one.

And there were no more doubts for either of them.


	16. Epilogue

V’Ginn had found Rwiari enthusiastic about sex before her pregnancy, but that had just been the expected norm for a Betazoid woman mid-phase. But now... well, now all of his off-duty hours—and a few more of his on-duty ones than he was comfortable with—were devoted to sating his mate’s voracious sexual appetite.

The problem was he could never quite bring himself to refuse her. Oh, some of it was the way that she approached him, soft and contrite for asking him in the middle of the work day, but some of it was because he still didn’t quite believe that she was here, at his side, by choice. That he hadn’t lost her completely in the tumultuous events that had lead to their mating, that she wanted him because, for some reason, she actually liked him. A good deal, it turned out. Enough to come back to him, enough to live on a Federation starship despite the harm the Federation had done to her personally.

And if she could make that compromise… he could make this one for her.

“I was thinking about you,” she was saying now, cuddled up close to his chest, the pair of them secluded in his lab off the medbay. “And then somehow I was here,” she added, sounding apologetic, looking up at him with wide, innocent eyes that V’Ginn couldn’t quite believe in the innocence of.

“Is that so,” he murmured, leaning down to press a kiss against her neck, right at the sweet little fold where it met her shoulder.

Ah there was the other reason he couldn’t refuse her. She was simply irresistible, all warm and soft and cuddly in his arms, her cheeks flushed hot with a combination of arousal and her obvious embarrassment that she had gone looking for him in the middle of his work day to beg him to help her take care of said arousal.

“Oh, don’t tease me.” Her lips brushed his ear and she slid her fingers along the backs of his hands, where they were clasped around her waist.

“Not teasing,” he responded, taking her earlobe between his lips and nibbling it gently. Rwiari let out a low moan and seemed to almost melt against him, the bulk of her stomach getting in the way. “Turn around,” he said in a soft, deep voice, directly against her ear.

She let out a low giggle and turned, and, with only a little prompting, bent over and propped her arms up on the exam table in his lab as he pulled the skirt of her dress up over her waist.

She wasn’t wearing anything under it. V’Ginn undid the front of his trousers, freeing the erection that had sprung up the instant she had joined him in his lab, a reaction to the arousal she had been projecting in his direction. But before entering her from behind, as he intended to, he took a moment and slid his fingers along the outer lips of her cunt. He let out a low grunt of satisfaction as he pressed his fingers into her, finding her inner folds slick and hot and ready for him.

“Don’t tease me,” she said again in a low, strangled voice.

“But it is so much fun.” V’Ginn did not smile often, but right now he found himself grinning. He cupped the curve of her ass in both hands for a moment, slid his hands down to her thighs, plump and tempting… and then lifted her bodily from the ground as he plunged into her from behind, a swift, violent thrust that buried him completely in her in an instant.

Rwiari let out a startled gasp and then a low moan. From what he could see beyond her mass of curls, she had buried her face in her hands, and was—at least from the noises she made when he started to move, taking her roughly without even the pretense of tenderness—most likely biting down on part of one hand to muffle her normally loud reaction to being fucked in such a way.

He no longer worried about hurting her. He knew her body so well, and more than that, he knew the rhythms of her mind, could easily adjust if she were uncomfortable or in pain, often did so without even realizing that he had. And as much as she enjoyed it when he was soft and sweet and tender, when she was as worked up as she had been when she had appeared in medbay just now—with a dazed look on her face as she made a beeline to his side and a mind humming with her need for him—well, that was always a time when she needed it fast and hard and a little violent. It grounded her in her body, he thought, to have him take her like that, and these days she needed grounding. She spent too much of her time deep inside her own mind, sheltering the growing minds of their future children, who had started to reach out to others almost as soon as they had developed enough of a brain to have their own independent consciousness. He could feel her busy at it even now, keeping their children shielded and safe from the tumult that had both of them in its grip.

Rwiari let out a little scream of pleasure and then clenched around him, hard, again and again, the spasms of her orgasm shaking her. The one true advantage of her current insatiability; she was so very sensitive right now that it didn’t take much to set her off.

V’Ginn withdrew from her, lifting and turning her so that she was sitting at the very end of the exam table. “Lean back,” he said, pressing a hand gently to the full curve of her stomach. She did so immediately, falling to her back, an instant later wrapping her legs around his neck as he lifted her hips bodily from the surface of the table and buried his face between her thighs. Now that she had interrupted him at work, he intended to completely exhaust her.

Not that exhausting her was easy, but he intended it.

She let out another scream in short order, this one breathless and desperate, and he lowered her back to the surface of the exam table and pulled her hips over the edge. She immediately wrapped her legs around his hips, and he thrust into her again… only to pause when she whimpered and a soft spasm that felt like pain ghosted across the surface of her mind. “Too much?”

“Keep going,” she panted, propping herself up on her elbows.

“Hm.” V’Ginn smiled and started working in her again, reaching up to tug the neckline of her dress downwards until he managed to expose a nipple. He put his mouth to her there, licking and nibbling at the sensitive nub, but after a moment she seized his face in her hands and pulled him into a kiss.

And then she spasmed around him again... and again, and this time her scream was one of pain. V’Ginn withdrew from her immediately and dove for the nearest medical tricorder, pulling his trousers up and fastening them awkwardly as he went

Rwiari let out a low hiss of breath and clamped her arms around her middle. “Is this...?”

“Labor,” V’Ginn confirmed, pressing the tricorder to her stomach before going straight to the replicator and ordering up a painkiller. “A little early, but with twins...”

“Not unexpected, I know.” She let out a low grunt of pain and tugged her dress back into order before tilting her head to one side to let him press the hypospray to her neck.

“Would you feel more comfortable with Dr. Stukov here?”

“I trust your abilities as a doctor,” Rwiari said, reaching gently for him with her mind. And then she let out a breathless, pained laugh. “But you would be more comfortable with him here, wouldn’t you?”

“I do not like to see you in pain.” He took her hand in his. “And I worry...” Another contraction hit Rwiari, and V’Ginn felt the pain of it as well, echoed through the mating bond between them.

“Better call him quick, then,” Rwiari said through gritted teeth. “I think they might be getting impatient.”

“V’Ginn to Stukov,” he said, tapping the badge on his chest with one hand, even as he sent his mind to Rwiari’s, trying to offer her calm. He could feel the minds of their children, too, distressed by the sudden changes to their environment.

“Victor Stukov is not on the ship,” the computer intoned. “Would you like to send a message?”

“Ah.” V’Ginn had forgotten that the other doctor had left for a conference that morning, and wracked his brain for another option, even as another contraction tore through Rwiari, the pain outpacing the strength of the painkiller. He gasped and clung to her, riding it out with her. “Computer, do any of the on-duty nurses have their midwife certificate?”

“Both on-duty nurses are certified midwives.”

V’Ginn didn’t bother with any more questions. “Computer, open door to my lab.” As soon as the door whooshed open, he called for his subordinates with a strangled shout.

Both of them poked their heads into V’Ginn’s lab cautiously. It was well-known by now what it meant when he disappeared into his lab with his mate in the middle of the day, and the caution was warranted. But almost immediately, they realized what was happening and came crowding in, one chastising V’Ginn for using the wrong pain medication as he fetched a new one—“I mean, this is fine for most things, but it’s not nearly strong enough for childbirth!”—and the other taking up the tricorder to see how far along Rwiari was.

“Better get a sedative for him, too,” the other nurse said, running the tricorder over V’Ginn as well, before muttering something that V’Ginn heard as “Mating bonds are ridiculous.”

The day took on a hazy aspect after that. One thing he did remember was this—their children were perfect. Both were somewhere on the spectrum between male and female, a circumstance not unexpected given the differing physiologies of Betazoids and Vulcans; it was surprising enough that his and Rwiari’s mating had produced two live and remarkably healthy offspring without expecting conformity to one end or the other of a binary gender to be among their traits. “Goodness knows what they’ll grow up to be,” Rwiari said in a soft, meandering sort of way as she lay there on the exam table, one of their children asleep on her chest. “But they’ll have plenty of time to figure it out.”

V’Ginn let out a soft sound of of agreement, his feelings too strong for him to speak, too strong for even the trained mental processes of his Vulcan mind to dull. Instead, he clasped their other child to his chest, marveling at the tiny shell of a pointed ear, the soft fuzz of hair on their scalp that was already showing signs of being just as wild as Rwiari’s mass of curls.

“We never finished choosing their names,” Rwiari said, sounding suddenly exasperated. “I kept meaning to—“

“Nisa and Adril,” V’Ginn said, finding his voice.

“After Isa’s parents? I thought we decided that would be too strange.” Rwiari sounded close to tears at that. Her cousin had been the one close family member she had had remaining, before his death.

“Do you think the captain would mind?”

“No,” Rwiari shook her head. “Oh, no. She would be honored.”

“And they should be Ibretens.”

“V’Ginn...” Rwiari really was crying now, tears pouring down her face. He got to his feet and set the baby he had been holding down in the crib that one of his nurses had wheeled into the room before fetching her tissues to wipe her face.

“Is that not the way of it on Betazed?” he asked as he dabbed tears off her face. “The children take the family name of their mother, do they not?”

“Here, put Nisa down too,” Rwiari said through her sniffles, offering up the baby that had been sleeping on her chest in exchange for the tissues she had been holding.

“This one is Nisa, then?” V’Ginn settled them next to their sibling in the crib.

“You’re not Betazoid,” Rwiari said in a trembling voice. “Why should you care about what we do on Betazed?”

V’Ginn returned to his mate’s side and reached for her, cupping a hand around her cheek, seeking both to comfort her and to intensify the connection caused by the mating bond strung tight between them. “Because it matters to you,” he said softly. “Because you are the last of your family, apart from the captain, and it matters to you.” He let her feel the truth of that statement, and she smiled up at him even as her tears turned into sobs.

_~Ow,~_ she sent him telepathically, both arms clasped around her midsection. The muscles torn and strained by birth had been re-knit, her natural healing processes sped up by the miracle of modern medical technology, but there was a certain amount of healing she would have to do the old-fashioned way. _~Crying hurts.~_

_~Do not worry,~_ he sent back, _~I will never again submit you to the indignity of a pregnancy.~_

The tears turned in to laughter. “Laughing isn’t better!” Rwiari exclaimed when she finally caught her breath. “You are a horrible man and you did that on purpose.”

“I could not bear to see my mate crying.” He leaned against the edge of the exam table, feeling a warm glow when Rwiari reached out and took his hand, though whether the warmth was his or hers he could not tell. “So much has changed since I met you. I have never cared about tears.” He turned his head to look at her, and she had a soft, concerned look on her face, a match to the concerned warmth he felt from her mind. “But I hate seeing yours.”

She was too overwhelmed for coherence. Instead, she just sent him a great flood of love, of joy, of... he did not have the words to describe it, but that did not matter when he could feel it as she did. In response, he lifted her hand to his mouth and kissed the back of it.

“I’m terrified,” she said on a low breath, breaking the silence, tears still shining in her eyes. “I’m afraid that we—that I won’t be able to be what they need. I didn’t have the most stable upbringing.”

He interlaced his fingers with hers and lifted her hand to his face, pressing his cheek to the back of it. “You will do just fine. And I have proof of it.”

“And what proof is that?”

“The captain.”

Her fear released, and she laughed once more in spite of the pain. “We still might mess it up, you know. Me getting it right once doesn’t mean I’ll get it right again.”

He rubbed his cheek gently against her hand. “No, but whether we get it right or wrong, we will do it together.”

“Together,” she echoed, a promise bound in a single word.

And that promise was everything that he needed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was mostly written during NaNoWriMo last year and I finally finished it and I felt silly adding it as its own thing when I could tack it on to this. And now I’ll just keep pretending this is actually done, and that I haven’t been considering going back and re-writing it.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Mating](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20937575) by [ssrhpurgatory](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssrhpurgatory/pseuds/ssrhpurgatory)
  * [Heat](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23292064) by [ssrhpurgatory](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssrhpurgatory/pseuds/ssrhpurgatory)


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